Bach and the Soprano Voice

2021 ◽  
pp. 79-114
Author(s):  
Wendy Heller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Lutheran Theology ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
Historically Informed Performance

The chapter begins with a simple question: given the fact that Bach’s music for sopranos was composed almost exclusively for boys, why have early music practitioners—including those endorsed in 2018 by the Bach Leipzig Archive—become so accustomed to using female sopranos? Taking account both of the rhetorical strategies that Bach uses in a representative group of soprano arias (choice of affect, use of topoi, scoring, and vocal writing) and the use of female sopranos in this repertory in concert, radio, and recordings since the nineteenth-century revival, this chapter proposes that Bach imbued his soprano arias with an intrinsic sense of femininity—passion, optimism, desire, compliance, modesty, and submission—that was central to his expression of Lutheran theology and that emerges as no less vital for listeners, even long after the original theological context had lost its relevance. The chapter also shows how Bach’s unacknowledged capacity for representing female subjectivity has influenced even the most historically informed performance practices.

The Languages of Petitioning in Early Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Levels

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.

Recreating the Beatles

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-98
Author(s):  
Matthias Heyman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Sound Recordings ◽  
Historically Informed Performance

Beatles tributes come in many forms and guises, but look-alikes are arguably the most popular type. Because of their focus on replicating the band’s iconic costumes and hairdo, they usually limit themselves to an easily reproducible core repertoire, forgoing the elaborate post-1966 studio productions. By contrast, sound-alikes strive for complete aural accurateness, often recreating the heavily produced compositions the Beatles never performed outside of the studio. One of the industry’s top-tier Beatles sound-alikes are the Analogues. Neglecting all mimetic visual effects, they re-animate the albums created after 1966, using the same orchestrations and instrumentations as the Beatles, including rare vintage instruments such as the Mellotron. Their approach bears parallels to historically informed performance (HIP), a common practice in Early Music, yet it operates within an entirely different framework. Informed by sound recordings, the Analogues deconstruct and re-record the Beatles’ music to construct their own performance, in the process conceiving a modern technology-based type of HIP. This article begins by establishing a typology of Beatles tributes before examining the process of staging an Analogues performance. It argues that the Analogues’ approach to historical recreation allows them to transcend criticism typically aimed at tributes and, paradoxically, lay claim to an “authentic” performance of what is inherently inauthentic, a live imitation of a recording. Overall, this article demonstrates how HIP can be used effectively outside of its mainstream classical context as a tool for popular music researchers and performers.

scholarly journals Evolution versus Authenticity: Johannes Brahms, Robert Franz, and Continuo Practice in the Late Nineteenth Century

2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johannes Brahms ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Music ◽  
The Past ◽  
Baroque Music ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
High Level ◽  
Early Music Revival

The early-music revival provoked much heated debate in the second half of the nineteenth century. The leading scholars of the era, Philipp Spitta and Friedrich Chrysander were keen to encourage performances and editions of early music that presented it in the spirit in which it was conceived. This approach met with vociferous opposition from Robert Franz and his supporters, who embraced a Darwinian aesthetic. Although committed to reviving the past, Franz believed that the tastes of nineteenth-century listeners had become too sophisticated to enjoy early music in its original state and modernized it accordingly. The source of the most heated debates was the issue of continuo realization, a topic in which Brahms, through his performing and arranging activities, had a vested interest. Franz, who dismissed the musicologists as artistic philistines, found a difficult adversary in Brahms. Brahms's scholarly inclinations have been well documented, and predictably, his approach to reviving Baroque music reflected a high level of historical awareness. He was, however, first and foremost a creative musician, and as a consequence, aesthetic issues were paramount in his performances and publications. Considerable tensions arose between Franz, and Brahms, and Chrysander, which are explored here in relation to the latter's editions of Handel's Italian duets and trios. The difficulties surrounding continuo practice were not confined to opposition from Franz; even among musicologists there was much disagreement about how the music should be performed. Brahms's approach to continuo realization is considered in this context.

The Education of Electra

Ladies' Greek ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Students ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Smith College ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Education Of Women ◽  
Dramatic Presentation

This chapter examines the spectacle of female classical literacy by focusing on two historic productions of Sophocles's tragedy Electra, staged in ancient Greek by the first generation of women students at Girton College in 1883 and at Smith College in 1889. It analyzes these women's performance of ancient Greek in relation to nineteenth-century debates about the higher education of women, and how they drew on a tradition of classical posing, to “transpose” the text into the visual and auditory languages associated with Delsartean performance practices. Their dramatic presentation depended on these alternative modes of translation as well as the subsequent re-presentation of the spectacle in various written accounts. The chapter considers how the cast of Electra was trained for a highly stylized performance, embodying the Sophoclean text in and for a collective student body that sought to commemorate itself through the ritual of mourning.

Is Medieval Music the New Avant-Garde? The Wilful, the Wayward and the Playful

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Coatman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Medieval Music ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
New Research

In his masterful exposé, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson deliciously debunks much traditional thinking about medieval music, arguing that changing perspectives on this increasingly re-discovered and available body of work may be more dependent on the personality of the scholars and performers involved in its dissemination than the findings of new research. In this chapter, writing from the point of view of a composer and musician equally involved in the performance of both new and early music, Graham Coatman examines the work of contemporary composers who have chosen medieval models as their starting point. Is their use of medieval material a means to establish identity and authenticity, or a reaction against the harmonic and formal legacy of the nineteenth century? How is the use of pre-existent material integrated into the contemporary creative process? With reference to selective case studies, Coatman finds parallels with their medieval counterparts that make their work all the more compelling.

Voices of Thunder

2019 ◽  
pp. 36-83
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
David Walker ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Maria Stewart

This chapter accounts for the centrality of nineteenth-century black oral culture to the development of the essay as a distinct African American literary genre. The author illustrates how the sermons and orations of nineteenth-century men and women such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Henry Highland Garnet, Frances Harper, and Fredrick Douglass laid the foundation for the African American essay. It is shown how these authors combined accounts of their personal experience with traditions of oral performance. Because the line between the spoken and written word was blurred by nineteenth-century conventions, these authors blended various rhetorical and performance strategies to shape the art of the essay. In doing so, these writers became “voices of thunder.”The essayists discussed in this chapter used biblical references and appropriated democratic discourse to advance anti-slavery agendas. They appropriated the rhetoric of the founding documents of the American republic and remade them into the rhetoric of counterrevolution. Their works emphasized the material realities of life in America for blacks, both enslaved and free. Their expressions of freedom, and the rhetorical strategies they modelled informed the work of their literary descendants.

Fallen Corpses and Rising Cities: The Bell Jar and the Making of the New Woman

Novel Shocks ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 104-124
Author(s):  
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
East Side ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
The New Woman

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar centers on two shock-fueled transformations: New York’s transformation from the nineteenth-century industrial city of slums, tenements, and factories to a shiny new metropolis and Esther’s transformation from an anxious, sick, and needy tenderfoot into a seemingly independent, liberated, and autonomous subject. Reading Esther’s psychic transformation against its geopolitical and spatial markers of renewal—the slumified lower east side of the Rosenbergs, the newly built glass-sheeted office buildings where the protagonist Esther works, and the newly constructed UN headquarters that hangs in Esther’s hotel window—the chapter challenges dominant readings of the novel, which often forefront how the double bind of consumer mass culture and patriarchal 1950s values trap and confine women. The chapter suggests the novel is less about the entrapment of women than it is about the formation of the woman we assume to be trapped. Specifically, it argues that the novel’s celebrated critique of the repressive, patriarchal state ultimately leads not to a more progressive position, but rather to the formation of a lactified, suburbanized, and entrepreneurial female subjectivity.

Idolatrous Reading

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy L. Carens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Unhealthy Food ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
Patriarchal Culture

Timothy L. Carens, “Idolatrous Reading: Subversive Fantasy and Domestic Ideology” (pp. 238–266) In nineteenth-century Britain, patriarchal culture revealed its anxieties about female subjectivity and anxiety through an extensive debate about what young women should read. As critics have already shown, many writers in the period disparaged romantic novels by comparing them to unhealthy food, addictive drugs, or even illicit sexual encounters. The figure of idolatry played a significant role in this debate as well, suggesting that young female readers might betray the true god of the middle-class patriarchal order by worshiping more gratifying alternatives. If the language of idolatry generally connoted heretical transgression, emergent feminist writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon found that they could also use it to articulate a woman’s longing for the power to shape her own dreams. In Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864), a figure used to disparage women who neglect their role within the domestic order thus acquires a new and intensely ironic life as a way to imagine an escape from it.

Enshrined Fortification: A Trialogue on the Rise and Fall of Safed

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-290
Author(s):  
Uri Zvi Shachar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Physical Characteristics ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Military Architecture ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Dialogue ◽  
Ritual Spaces

The study of castles has formed a major part of crusade historiography since its inception in the early nineteenth century. Fortification has been taken to represent the magnificence of the efforts to rule the Holy Land and the battle between Christianity and Islam. Recently, however, scholars have recognised that, inasmuch as castles were celebrated as the epitomes of resilience and hostility, military architecture was far more dialogical than previously noticed. The design of castles involved a highly nuanced familiarity with the culture from which they were intended to defend. This article seeks to show that not only the physical characteristics of castles but also ideas about what made them religiously successful, in their capacity to enact and protect ritual spaces, were shaped through a dynamic inter-religious dialogue. Taking Safed as a case study, this article brings together three narratives—in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew—that share the attempt to laud the castle by drawing a dialectic between its strategic might and the sanctity of the soil upon which it is built. While the three accounts differ radically in their political stakes, the rhetorical strategies they employ in order to contemplate the spiritual efficacy of the castle is profoundly entangled.

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