1,721,003 research outputs found
Nadia Boulanger and Her World
No full textNadia Boulanger (1887–1979) was arguably one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century music, and certainly among the most prominent musicians of her time. For many composers— especially Americans from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass—studying with Boulanger in Paris or Fontainebleau was a formative moment in a creative career
The sense of ending in Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde
Get PDFThe final moments of Das Lied von der Erde have consistently been regarded as one of the most enigmatic endings in the history of Western music. The lack of musical resolution of the last movement offers a view into eternity that strikes a potent blow to our rational conception of human experience. An understanding of Mahler's relationship to fin-de-siècle society and his interaction with previous expressions of musical endings, especially those of Beethoven's Ninth and Wagner's Tristan, helps to shed some light on the ending of Das Lied. Mahler expresses his Weltanschauung through the tension that emanates from Das Lied. The unsettling result of this tension however, is not resolution or triumph, but an eternal (ewig), never-ending dialectic struggle between the psyche and the exterior world
Seducing Paris: piano virtuosos and artistic identity, 1820-48
Get PDFCultural, musical, and even erotic icons of the 1830s, pianists such as Franz Liszt and Fryderyk Chopin ignited Parisian audiences with their spectacular virtuosity, physical appearance, and flamboyant showmanship. Their audiences responded with a fanatical devotion like that lavished on modern-day celebrities, who owe their charismatic personae in some measure to the cultural paths blazed by these early Parisian idols of the keyboard. Indeed, from the period of Liszt's sojourn in Paris (1824-48) emerged influential attitudes and practices that shaped nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical life the world over. In the early 1820s, virtuoso musicians flocked to Paris to establish their careers and their fortunes, directing their attention to the audiences that populated public concert halls. Pianists in particular began to craft their public images with the same care that they lavished on their art, self-consciously engaging with audience tastes, social context, and intellectual and musical ideals to project images that appealed to the audiences of musical Paris. The virtuosity of these musicians extended beyond the keyboard into social, practical, and ideological realms, and their activities influenced more than the immediate reception of their music: their larger-than-life exploits also shaped subsequent accounts of music history. This study examines how such virtuosos as Chopin, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Liszt, Marie Pleyel (the female Liszt), and mile Prudent, constructed their identities and launched their careers in Paris. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including journalistic accounts, personal papers, iconography, and archives records from concert halls and piano manufacturers, this dissertation investigates largely uncharted issues of concert life, gender, nationalism, and aesthetics in Parisian musical life
The patron saint of music: Beethoven's image and music in Japan's adoption of western classical music and practices
Get PDFThis thesis explores the factors that led to the enduring popularity of Beethoven's music in Japan. Early in the Meiji Period (1868-1912) when Japan embraced Westernization, German artists and educators instilled respect for the tradition of German art music in their Japanese students. Beethoven's music became the most valued source of material for education and performance in Japan in the years before the Second World War. During the war, Western music faced opposition from a nationalist government which reversed course, calling for the development of a native Japanese musical style untainted by Western oppression. However, Beethoven's music still found a ready place in concert halls and schools. Many teachers and performers came to its rescue, defending the music's masculinity, German origins, and associations with Beethoven's Romantic determination and unyielding spirit. After the war, his music escaped censorship because of its widespread popularity and the belief that Beethoven transcended his nationality
The Trouble with Leitmotifs: Aaron Copland and The Heiress (1949)
Get PDFOver the course of the 1930s, the standardization of film music in Hollywood progressed rapidly, and the sound tracks became dominated by an Austro-German Romantic idiom. When Aaron Copland first began scoring films in the late 1930s, romances, period pictures, dramas, and other film genres commonly featured sweeping love themes, thick contrapuntal textures, and lush orchestration. In his early writings on film music, however, Copland eschewed the Romantic tropes utilized by most studio composers, specifically deriding the leitmotif as trite and overused. Yet when Copland revised his views on appropriate film-scoring methods in an article published in 1949, he made no mention of leitmotifs. That same year, too, he devised a plan to use leitmotifs when scoring William Wyler’s psychological melodrama, The Heiress. This thesis explores the shift in Copland’s views on appropriate film-scoring techniques between 1940 and 1950, and seeks to address his use of leitmotifs in The Heiress.Master of Art
"She Was No Beauty, But-" The Careers and Public Images of Pauline Viardot, Emma Calvé, and Sibyl Sanderson
Get PDFIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, female singers were at the
heart of the opera scene. Prima donnas experienced more power on and off the stage as
artists and as celebrities in this period than perhaps any other. They were central in
negotiations with distribution of arias in operas, visits to the impresario, theater owners and composers, dressing rooms, carriages to take them to their destinations, and more. They collaborated with the composers who wrote for them, performed title roles in a significant number of operas, and were widely loved by the public. These women’s identities, however, presented perhaps a unique dichotomy. They were both a seductive siren and a powerful and financially independent career woman. They held agency, yet they were also seen as an object for consumption and pleasure. Many of these divas left a legacy of distinct and well-designed careers, as well as the memory of voices that drew an entire public to them. While it may seem, at first glance, that their long-lasting careers were a result of their voices alone, looking deeper shows us
that they crafted their brand carefully. In this thesis, I explore how three nineteenth-century singers shaped their public personas and brand in terms of their interactions with the press, their colleagues, and their audience through career moves and publicly-released images. I seek to illustrate that there were numerous factors beyond the diva’s voice that contributed to the trajectory of her career, many of which were shaped by a diva’s own agency. I have chosen, as my case studies, three singers whose careers centered around Paris in particular: Pauline Viardot, Sibyl Sanderson, and Emma Calvé. While each singer had a unique career that drew attention to different parts of their identities as women and singers, all three needed to cope with the misogyny inherent in nineteenth-century patriarchy. For that reason, each singer developed her own strategies around a system that was challenging both in professional and personal ways.Bachelor of Art
Composing for the Red Screen: Sergei Prokofiev’s Film Scores
Get PDFSergei Prokofiev's film scores are unique for having attained a steadfast place in the canon of classical music, a feat the composer accomplished in the complicated and oppressive artistic milieu of Stalin's Russia. The eight films for which he wrote music encompass a range of musical and cinematic genres, from the well-known Aleksandr Nevskii and Lieutenant Kizhe to more obscure propaganda films such as The Partisans in the Ukrainian Steppe and Tonia. Discussion of the composer's work with film music, including his celebrated collaboration with director Sergei Eisenstein, has remained absent from musicological literature. This study uses newly-available archival materials to explore Prokofiev's work with film, considering issues of collaboration, technology, aesthetics, and—perhaps most importantly—the privileged and hyper-politicized role of film production and composition in Stalin’s Russia. Chapter 1 explores how Prokofiev, already a world-renowned composer by 1933, approached an uncharted musical genre with the 1934 film Lieutenant Kizhe. For the film, he forged a strikingly sparse, hyper-lyrical style that would characterize both his film music and his incidental music during the mid-1930s. The first chapter also introduces Prokofiev's relationship with technology and new media. Chapters 2 and 3 address Prokofiev's scores for Mikhail Romm's Queen of Spades and Eisenstein's Aleksandr Nevskii, respectively, showing how each resulted from an effort to adapt, transform and employ the Russian past in service of the Soviet present. Chapter 4 focuses on four minor films for which Prokofiev wrote music in 1941-42, and shows how Prokofiev coped with the disruption brought on by war, both financially and ideologically. In chapter 5 I analyze instances of audiovisual dissonance in Ivan the Terrible, Prokofiev's last film project, and argue that they represent transformative moments that are a direct extension of Eisenstein's dialectical film theories
Building Our Cultural Defenses: The Noninterventionist Rhetoric of the National Federation of Music Clubs
Get PDFThe public writings of the National Federation of Music Clubs and its fourteenth president, Julia Ober, argued for American noninterventionism in the late 1930s and early 1940s. These texts deployed a conceptual and aesthetic framework for musical advocacy and activism in America, in which America's love for and preservation of traditional European classical music became a model for American peace during time of war. They proposed that European music could undergo a process of naturalization analogous to the naturalization of thousands of European émigrés. American musicians and audiences could perform, listen to, and love music originating from Axis countries without thereby supporting the Axis. Cultivating this music would create a safe harbor for the preservation of European culture throughout the war. Musical noninterventionism also promoted national defense through culture: focusing on art and music would help Americans resist foreign warmongering and at the same time create the foundations for a lasting American peace. This political program developed in contrast both to internationalist modernism and isolationist American nationalism, and also in opposition to contemporary masculine discourses of composition, aesthetics, and performance
Mediating modern music: Nadia Boulanger constructs Igor Stravinsky
Get PDFBeginning in the 1920s, Nadia Boulanger promoted Igor Stravinsky unceasingly, serving as cultural mediator between the Russian master and the general public until her death in 1979. Fuelling this passion was an hitherto undocumented creative exchange between Boulanger and Stravinsky that lasted over forty years. Beginning in 1929, Stravinsky sent his son, Soulima, to Boulanger for his musical education, and by 1930, the composer started exchanging autograph scores with her. In 1931, they engaged in their first project together: the editorial revision of the piano/vocal reduction for the Symphony of Psalms. This exchange led to their extra-compositional collaboration on numerous other projects, including the Symphony in C, Stravinsky's Mass, and his opera, The Rake's Progress. Drawing on newly-discovered correspondence, scores, and analytical materials, this dissertation offers for the first time a detailed and nuanced account of how these two figures existed in a symbiotic relationship.Doctor of Philosoph
Theater music in France, 1864-1914
Get PDFIncidental music served as a major outlet for composers during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century. Over three hundred and fifty premières and dozens of major revivals of older works took place during the fifty-year span of this study. Composers who contributed incidental music included Bizet, Bruneau, Chausson, Debussy, Delibes, Fauré, Gounod, Massenet, Pierné, Saint-Saëns, and many other less celebrated composers. This study examines the nature and significance of this oft-neglected genre. The topic is approached through five case studies meant to provide various cross-sections of noteworthy aspects of the genre over this fifty-year span. The approach to the case studies is twofold: through studies of the institutions which produced the most incidental music during this period, and through three productions which provide a variety of approaches with regard to their dates, theaters, compositional styles, and their respective places in their composers' careers. The Comédie-Française is examined across this fifty-year time, with particular regard to the contributions made by Léo Delibes and by Laurent Léon, the orchestral director of the theater from 1871-1913. The Théâtre de l’Odéon (1884-1892) and the Grand-Théâtre (1892-1893) are studied during the directorships of Paul Porel, the director who was responsible for reviving Bizet’s L’Arlésienne after its thirteen-year slumber. Examinations of Jules Massenet’s music for the tragedy Les Erinnyes (1873/1876), Claude Terrasse’s music for the farce Ubu roi (1896), and Claude Debussy’s music for the mystery play Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911) impart varied insights into the range of musical styles present, into the interactions between theater and music, into the nature of the genre, and into the roles which incidental music played in the careers of composers. The breadth and depth of the genre is indicated by an appendix which lists the major premières and revivals of incidental scores from the years 1864-1914, with some coverage of the years before and after the period
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