The Public Ball in Viennese Musical Life, 1770–1830

2022 ◽  
pp. 10-31
Keyword(s):  
Musical Life ◽  
The Public

Symphonies and the Public Display of Topics

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Sisman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Expanding Universe ◽  
Public Display ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Multiple Audiences ◽  
The Church ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Musical Styles

To the multiple audiences for whom Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries composed—patrons, publishers, players, and an expanding universe of listeners at different levels of knowledge—symphonies were the ubiquitous markers of public musical life in the later eighteenth century, opening and sometimes closing concerts and theatrical events. To heighten their appeal and intelligibility, classical composers found topics for their symphonies in the expressive worlds of opera and theater, as well as in the realms of human activity in nature, at court, or (less often) in the church. In so doing, they heightened their listeners’ range of musical experiences and the possibility of shared interpretations. Rereading contemporaneous opinion to find surprising topical correlations, this chapter develops an understanding of symphonic topics that draws both on referential musical styles and on the textures and colors of the orchestra itself.

Motor City Music

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Slobin
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Black Immigrants ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Musical Identity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
The Media ◽  
Special Case

The book combines memoir, interview, and archival sources to survey the musical life of the author’s hometown, Detroit, in his youth during the city’s heyday, 1940s–1960s. After an opening chapter on the formation of personal musical identity, the focus shifts to the formative role of the public school system in educating and shaping the careers of waves of highly talented youth, many of whom became leading figures in African American and classical music nationally. Next comes a panorama of the “neighborhood” subcultural musics of European, southern white, and southern black immigrants to Detroit, followed up by a close-up of the Jewish community’s special case. “Merging Traffic” considers the way that industry, labor, the counterculture, Motown, and the media brought many streams of music together. A final retrospective chapter cites the work of Detroit writers and artists who, like the author, have been looking back at the city’s impact on their work. This is the first-ever comprehensive survey of the musical life of any American city in a given time period.

Ethics and aesthetics: the social theory of barbershop harmony

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Garnett
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Relative Paucity ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Until recently, the world of the British barbershop singer was a self-enclosed community whose existence went largely unrecognised both by musicians involved in other genres and by the public at large. In the last few years this has started to change, chiefly due to the participation of barbershop choruses in the televised competition ‘Sainsbury's Choir of the Year’. Encouraged by the success of Shannon Express in 1994, many other choruses entered the 1996 competition, four of them reaching the televised semi-finals, and two the finals. During this increased exposure, it became apparent that television commentators had little idea of what to make of barbershoppers, indeed regarded them as a peculiar, and perhaps rather trivial, breed of performer. This bafflement is not surprising given the genre's relative paucity of exposure either in the mass media or in the musical and musicological press; the plentiful articles written by barbershoppers about their activity and its meanings are almost exclusively addressed to each other, to sustain the community rather than integrate it into wider musical life. The purpose of this paper, however, is not to follow the theme of these intra-community articles in arguing that barbershop harmony should actually be regarded as a serious and worthy art, or to explain to a bewildered world what this genre is actually about; rather, it aims to explore the way that barbershop singers theorise themselves and their activity to provide a case study in the relationship between social and musical values. That is, I am not writing as an apologist for a hitherto distinctly insular practice, but exploiting that very insularity as a means to pursue a potentially very broad question within a self-limited field of enquiry.

The Public Face of Chinatown: Actresses, Actors, Playwrights, and Audiences of Chinatown Theaters in San Francisco during the 1920s

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCY YUNHWA RAO
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cantonese Opera ◽  
Interior Layers ◽  
Artistic Self

AbstractIn the twentieth century, elaborate and prosperous Chinatown theaters in New York and San Francisco (from the 1920s to the early 1930s) constituted a golden age of Cantonese opera in the United States, a vivid musical life that has been almost completely expunged from U.S. cultural memory. Seeking a historical narrative for this musical past—preserving those vivid sonorities and glamorous images that “threaten to disappear irretrievably”—entails an examination of the actresses, actors, musicians, and playwrights who enlivened the stages of these opera theaters, as well as the audiences who flocked to see them. In particular, this study sheds light on the significance of the performers named on the daily playbills and pictured in newspapers or on immigration bond papers. The images and sonorities extend beyond the bounds of the theaters to epitomize the Chinese community. The study not only offers a significant window into the interior layers of the music lives of Chinese America, but also reflects on the Chinatown community's sense of its musical and artistic self.

‘Unmistakeable Sauerkrauts’: Local Perceptions of Itinerant German Musicians in New Zealand, 1850–1920

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-49
Author(s):  
Samantha Owens
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Local Perceptions ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
School Sports ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Street Corner ◽  
First World

Although largely forgotten today, bands of German musicians (generally from the Westpfalz region) were regular visitors to New Zealand’s shores from the 1850s up until the outbreak of World War I, making them among the earliest professional European musical ensembles to be heard in the country. Plying their trade on the streets and in other public spaces, German bands were also routinely hired to perform for garden parties, school sports days, dances and boat trips, as well as on countless other occasions. Yet despite their apparent popularity, contemporary comment published in newspapers of the day demonstrates that reactions to their performances were decidedly mixed. While some members of the public clearly enjoyed the contribution German bands made to local musical life, others were less than delighted by their (often noisy) presence. In 1893, for example, one Wellington resident complained that ‘a German Band … may be heard braying at every street corner at all hours of the day and night’, while noting also that ‘It is the genuine article, all the performers being wanderers from the “Vaterland”, unmistakeable “sauerkrauts”’ Within weeks of the outbreak of World War I, ten members of a German band had been arrested in Auckland and taken to Somes Island in Wellington harbour, where they were interned for the duration of the conflict. This article examines the New Zealand public’s changing perceptions of this particular brand of street musician from colonial times until shortly after the end of the First World War.

The Lives and Voices of Professional Female Singers

2020 ◽  
pp. 156-180
Author(s):  
David Kennerley
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Feminine Norms ◽  
Female Singers ◽  
Professional Singer

This chapter explores the meaning of the professional female voice through the experiences of three singers from the 1830s and ’40s: Adelaide Kemble, Clara Novello, and Marianne Lincoln. It continues the argument of Chapters 2 and 3 by exploring how contemporary divisions over the sound of femininity affected the ways singers chose to use their voices. Their letters and diaries show how they were caught between a desire to develop their professional technique and artistry, and an equally strong anxiety that, in doing so, they might contravene feminine norms expected by important sections of the public and even by family and friends. These case studies thus expose the ongoing tensions between the ideals of the professional singer and of femininity in British musical life, but they also indicate that, through complex, sometimes agonising negotiation, it was increasingly possible for these women to develop successful careers as professional female musical artists.

scholarly journals The Other Otto Dresel: Public and Private Musical Identities in a German-American ‘Forty-Eighter’ and his Family, c. 1860–1880

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Molly Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Musical Culture ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Distinctive Character ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Family ◽  
Civic Virtues ◽  
German American

This essay explores the musical life of a German-American ‘Forty-Eighter’ and his family, with particular attention to their domestic musical preferences as reflected in five surviving sheet-music albums. Otto Dresel, easily confused with the far more prominent German musician of the same name who settled in Boston, was a gifted amateur whose public musical activities, both choral and instrumental, typified those of many German arrivals of that generation. This was a largely male realm of affirmative, expansive ideals; here the stress was on civic virtues, happy fraternal bonds, and the celebration of German musical culture as an elevating force in America. The family albums suggests that the music he shared with his wife and children at home in Columbus, Ohio, served quite different purposes. It was performed intimately, in an often melancholy and even mournful mode that reflected the need for personal consolation and was thus more in keeping with typical Victorian attitudes toward the domestic, womanly sphere. Evidence about the troubled course of Dresel's life helps us understand his growing need to take refuge in his home and family as well as in music that helped him and his loved ones deal – for a time, at least – with deepening feelings of regret, failure and loss. This marked contrast between the public and private sides of the Dresels’ musical lives points to a need for greater attention to the distinctive character and functions of intimate family music-making in nineteenth-century America, especially during the years of widespread disillusionment and cultural reorientation that followed the Civil War.

scholarly journals A Multifunctional Model of a Modern Listener’s Behavior

2021 ◽  
pp. 128-147
Author(s):  
T.A. Tsvetkovskaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Music Listening ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
The Public ◽  
Youth Subcultures ◽  
Musical Event ◽  
Listening Experience ◽  
Historical Practices

The article focuses on strengthening positions of a modern listener in the context of the development of academic musical art. Since the end of the last century, there has been a surge in scientific interest in studying the audience of classical music. Listening experience is being analyzed on an equal basis with composition and performing. Interdisciplinary researches touch upon historical practices, semantic aspects and communication characteristics. However, today the very nature of listeners’ relationship with art is changing, too. The listener becomes an active participant in musical events, playing new roles — that of a musical critic, manager, expert, and even a co-author and performer of works. The formation of new listener’s functions in addition to the perception of music requires a revision of the audience evaluation factor, now based only on the sophistication of the “listening function”. The issue of justifying a new scheme, which would take into account the positions of all participants in a musical event in relation to each other, is extremely relevant. The public refuses the “vassal” role and steadily strengthens its position in the intergroup hierarchy by choosing new behaviors. While the leitmotif of the musical life of the 20th century was the theme of educating a wide audience of genuine taste and a deep understanding of musical content, today the listeners defend their freedom of choice. It is important to understand the reasons and predict the consequences of the increasing emancipation of not only the experienced listener, but also of the neophyte. Music streaming services make a significant contribution to this process. The growing popularity of two youth subcultures demonstrating a high interest in classical art — Dark Academia and Light Academia — deserves attention too.

Replications can cause distorted belief in scientific progress

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Białek
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
The Public ◽  
Psychological Science

AbstractIf we want psychological science to have a meaningful real-world impact, it has to be trusted by the public. Scientific progress is noisy; accordingly, replications sometimes fail even for true findings. We need to communicate the acceptability of uncertainty to the public and our peers, to prevent psychology from being perceived as having nothing to say about reality.

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