Performing the Mass in B Minor in an Age of Choices

Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

Every performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’'s Mass in B Minor makes choices. The work’s compositional history and the nature of the sources that transmit it require performers to make decisions about its musical text and about the performing forces used in its realization. The Mass’s editorial history reflects deeply ideological views about Bach’s composition and how it should sound, not just objective reporting on the piece, with consequences for performances that follow specific editions. Things left unspecified by the composer need to be filled in, and every decision—including the choice to add nothing to Bach’s text—represents an interpretation. And the long performance history of the Mass offers a range of possibilities, reflecting a tension between the performance of a work like the Mass in Bach’s time and the tradition inherited from the nineteenth century. Every performance thus represents a point of view about the piece; —there are no neutral performances.

2021 ◽  
pp. 327-349
Author(s):  
Zsófia Kalavszky ◽  

In my essay I trace how – by which means and through what channels – the Ukrainian song «Ĭхав козак за Дунай» (Kozak was riding beyond the Danube) reached Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth-century and then by the means of German mediation, sprang out onto Hungarian territories. In the German language area, it spread essentially as a folk song. Translated (or rather transcribed) into German by Christopher Tidge, the Ukrainian song reached the Kingdom of Hungary most likely together with the troops that took part in the Napoleon wars. At the same time, another version of the song circulated among the Hungarian elite in German culture. The latter was known as Russisches Lied in the translation of Theodor Körner – it was also in vogue and was distributed mainly in print media. The history of this song that in the first decade of the nineteenth century, gained fame in Czech, Polish, and English, has another line that may be interesting from the point of view of Russian and Hungarian literary connections. In 1814, Russian poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker translated the song into German. His translation which remained in the form of the manuscript and was not known to the reading public reveals an amazing similarity and in some places direct coincidences with the poem by the Hungarian poet Count Ferenc Teleki written presumably before 1820.


1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (03) ◽  
pp. 166-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Dale

I have been asked to speak about the history of the experimental method in medicine, with particular reference to the nineteenth century. This indication, though I do not propose to regard it as setting a limit, seems to have a special fitness, since it is to the nineteenth century, and especially to its latter half, that we must look for the effective beginning and astonishingly rapid development, the veritable outburst, indeed, of activity in the application of the experimental method to medicine, which opened the new era of medical progress in which we are living today. It is curious, perhaps, that this should have come so late in the history of science. For medicine had figured early in man's attempts to understand nature and his relation to it, and many departments of science which have long ago achieved recognition as independent bodies of knowledge originated as aspects of the physician's equipment—botany, for example, zoology and chemistry, as well as human anatomy and physiology, which still retain their attachment to the medical group of the scientific disciplines. From this point of view, then, it is not surprising to find two physicians, William Gilbert and William Harvey, as the leaders in this country of the scientific revolution which had begun in Europe in 1543 with the publication, within a few weeks of one another, of two books—one by Copernicus of Cracow,De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, and the other by Vesalius of Padua,De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Both Gilbert and Harvey, we may be proud to remember, studied and first graduated in Medicine here, in Cambridge.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-362
Author(s):  
Rodrigo de SALES ◽  
Daniel MARTÍNEZ-ÁVILA ◽  
José Augusto GUIMARÃES

Abstract In this paper, we study the theoretical intersections and dialogues between some foundational authors on classification and indexing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that helped developing the theoretical-methodological framework of knowledge organization. More specifically, we highlight and analyze the theoretical convergences of Harris, Dewey, Cutter, Otlet, Kaiser, and Ranganathan as they can provide a clearer picture of the historical and theoretical contributions to the epistemological foundations of knowledge organization. Our methodology follows a critical-descriptive approach to the analysis of the main contributions of the authors and the critical reflections of some specialists and biographers. We continue with a discussion of the links between bibliographic classifications and knowledge organization drawing on the ideas of Bliss; then, we divide our historical narrative between the theoretical contributions during the nineteenth-century (Harris, Dewey, and Cutter) and the twentieth century (Otlet, Kaiser, and Ranganathan); and finally, we present a discussion of the history of knowledge organization from the point of view of the theoretical and methodological development of classification and indexing at the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. We conclude with some remarks on their main contributions to the development of the knowledge organization field.


1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 29-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz A. J. Szabo

The Habsburg monarchy was never a major sea power, and for most of its four centuries of existence it had no substantial navy at all. Especially before the nineteenth century the history of Habsburg naval armaments, therefore, is of little interest to the military specialist and more significant as a footnote to the domestic political history of the monarchy. At no time was this more the case than during the reign of Maria Theresa (1740–1780). From a military point of view the naval projects of this period could furnish, at best, the plot of an opera buffa, but from an administrative and economic point of view they highlight some of the most fundamental problems of enlightened absolutism in Austria.


2009 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Price

The ambition of this article is to wrest attention away from the fraction of any book's life cycle spent in the hands of readers and toward, instead, the whole spectrum of social practices for which printed matter provides a prompt. It asks, how accounts of print culture would look if narrated from the point of view not of human readers and users, but of the book. Turning to the nineteenth-century genre of "it-narrative"——which traces the travel of a book among a series of owners and handlers——it asks how such a narrative might compare to more familiar accounts of selves shaped by texts.


1977 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 313-327
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley

The nineteenth-century histories of England were inspired by and reflect the political and religious ideologies of the era; the liberal anglican school described by Duncan Forbes, the varieties of high church scholarship from Christopher Wordsworth to canon Dixon, the optimistic whiggery of Hallam and Macaulay, the protestant high toryism of Southey, the political protestantism of Froudc and the teutomania of Freeman. Most of these writers had two ideas in common; a strong sense of the importance of national history as a reinforcement of the English sense of self identity, and the oneness of English history. This was a view given classic expression m John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People, and has been perpetuated by Trevelyan and Churchill into the twentieth century. Far better than most of his predecessors, Green’s history was more than just a history of the nation written from a partisan point of view, and owed its popularity as much to its breadth of sympathy as to the author’s gift for quicksilver generalisation and narration which move the reader on at the pace of a hare. In this last quality, it was most unlike the most popular nineteenth-century history of England before its publication, the work of a Roman catholic priest John Lingard, though Lingard also professed to rise above the turmoil of parties to write an impartial history.


In the Rede Lecture which he delivered in 1878 Clerk Maxwell wrote : ‘ The special educational value of this combined study of music and acoustics is that more than almost any other study it involves a continual appeal to what we must observe for ourselves.’ It had been the defect of musical theory in the preceding century or more that it had continually failed to make this appeal. If, however, we go to earlier days still, to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before Rameau (1683-1764) ‘ discovered ’ the so-called chord of nature in the harmonic overtones of a musical note, we find a different story. True, we find the curious-minded speculating, as the Pythagoreans had done, about the fundamental nature of music ; but we do not find them laying down the law for composers, as the English neo-Pythagoreans attempted to do in the nineteenth century. From this point of view, as well as from that of the history of acoustics, some of the early papers in the Philosophical Transactions are as significant as they are interesting. Two of these papers appear, at first sight, to be primarily scientific. Their importance in the history of musical theory will emerge later in this paper.


Lituanistica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Titas Krutulys

The paper is focused on historical articles in the periodical press of 1904 to 1918 from a quantitative point of view. This period was significant because the year 1904 marks the beginning of the legitimate Lithuanian periodical press and also the period of Lithuanian political diversification, while 1918 starts the period of the Republic of Lithuania. History was an important part of the Lithuanian national movement and it helped to create the Lithuanian identity. On the other hand, the historical significance of historical articles in the Lithuanian periodical press is usually overrated or unclear. This study shows that during this period, historical articles make up only about 1.8 per cent of the whole list of topics of articles. Meanwhile, such themes as politics, economics, religion, and literature were much more popular. However, it also shows clear progress of Lithuanian historical articles from only 27 articles in 1904 to 358 articles in 1918. This progress was uneven and we can distinguish four quantitative upswings: in 1905, 1910, 1914, and 1918. Analysis of the most common topics in Lithuanian historical articles showed that the history of the Lithuanian countryside was the most popular. Thus, the history of places close to most of the Lithuanians living in the countryside was more common than the history of the Lithuanian cities. The most popular periods of Lithuanian history was the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries and the history of the nineteenth century. Among historical events, the most popular were the Battle of Žalgiris, the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and lifting the ban on the Lithuanian press in 1904. Foreign history was also quite popular in Lithuanian periodicals. The article also deals with the relation of different Lithuanian political ideologies to historical articles. While two right-wing political groups, Lithuanian nationalists and Lithuanian Christian Democrats, wrote widely on historical topics and especially liked the period of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries and the nineteenth century in Lithuanian history, the Lithuanian left-wing or centre-left political parties, Lithuanian Social Democrats and Lithuanian Democrats, wrote about the past and overall history of Lithuania much less: they were mostly interested in the history of the nineteenth century and in foreign history.


2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-5
Author(s):  
Katherine K. Preston

The history of music in nineteenth-century America, and the place of music within American culture of the period, is an area of scholarly inquiry that recently has received increased attention. It is also, as the varied articles collected in this issue illustrate, a complex topic and an area ripe for much additional research. The four articles deal with different aspects of nineteenth-century American music history and culture; in each, however, there are also areas of overlap and intersection. All four authors use as a starting point issues that have already been the subject of some scholarly attention, and examine these topics either more thoroughly or from a new theoretical or contextual point of view. The resulting aggregate should help readers to understand better a complicated and under-explored world, for all four articles highlight the complexity of musical life in America and explore some of the many ways that cultural life in the United States reflected and resonated with that of Europe. All four authors, furthermore, either hint at or explicitly mention areas that are ripe for further research.


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