The Solfeggio Tradition

Author(s):  
Nicholas Baragwanath

The book is the first study of the solfeggio tradition, which was fundamental to the training of European musicians c. 1680–1830. It addresses one of the last major gaps in historical research concerning eighteenth-century performance and pedagogy. The method flourished in Italian conservatories for disadvantaged children, especially at Naples. The presence of large manuscript collections in European archives (almost three hundred in Italy alone) attests to the importance of this kind of exercise. Drawing on research into more than a thousand manuscript sources, the book reconstructs the way professional musicians in Europe learned and thus conceived the fundamentals of music. It reveals an approach that differs radically from modern assumptions. Solfeggi underpinned an art of melody that allowed practitioners to improvise and compose fluently. Part I provides contextual information about apprenticeship, the church music industry, its associated schools, and the continued significance of plainchant to music education. Part II reconstructs the real lessons of an apprentice over the course of three or four years from spoken to sung solfeggio. Part III surveys the primary sources, classifying solfeggi into four main types and outlining their historical origins, characteristic features, and pedagogical purposes.

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valdeci Silva Izabel Junior

O principal interesse deste trabalho é explorar algumas potencialidades que podem ser extraídas dos documentos paroquiais setecentistas, através das argumentações e propostas expostas, considerando sua importância, não só, como mecanismos de controle da Igreja e da Coroa, mas, também, como suportes de informações sobre a sociedade civil de suma importância no campo de pesquisa da demografia histórica. Assim como promover um estudo compartilhado sobre as possibilidades de utilização do conteúdo dessas fontes primárias para a compreensão das relações e formação das redes familiares que se consolidavam a partir da recepção dos sacramentos do batismo e do matrimônio. The main interest of this paper is to explore some potentialities that can be extracted from eighteenth-century parish documents, through the argumentations and proposals exposed, considering its importance, not only, as mechanisms of control from the Church and the Crown, but, also, as information support about the civil society of paramount importance in the historical demography research field. As to promote a shared study about the possibilities of the use of this primary sources content to the understanding of the relations and arrangement of family networks that were consolidating from the reception of the sacraments of baptism and matrimony.  


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (44) ◽  
pp. 71-91
Author(s):  
Evgenii Platonov

Traditional Russian worldviews explained healing from water sources in terms both Protestants and Catholics would have used elsewhere in Europe: as the grace of God or as the intervention of saints through associated relics or wonder-working icons. Holy wells were freely venerated within parishes until the eighteenth century when Peter the Great and the Holy Synod (the Russian Orthodox Church’s highest governing body) forbade pilgrimage to holy wells in a reformist drive to eradicate religious “superstitions.” This essay employs primary sources to consider how nineteenth-century developments at Russian holy wells and mineral springs related to social class, economics and those eighteenth-century reforms that merged the church with government structures. While liturgical activities at holy wells and the designation of new holy wells was criminalized, mineral springs gained appeal for “scientific” cures and as resort enterprises for the upper classes


2020 ◽  
pp. 239-248
Author(s):  
Nicholas Baragwanath

The chapter offers an interpretation of the primary sources concerning eighteenth-century solfeggio, classifying solfeggi into four main types and outlining their historical origins, characteristic features, and pedagogical purposes. Both syllables and didactic function must be considered essential to any workable definition of solfeggio. Ambiguities arise, however, because the term was (and still is) applied to other types of pedagogical melody by extension, convention, or analogy. Cutting across the four types are the two broad traditions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century solfeggi: one essentially contrapuntal, with roots in the ricercar, and the other essentially cantabile, stemming from opera and cantata. Various types of keyboard accompaniment and their purposes are outlined.


2020 ◽  
pp. 160-198
Author(s):  
Макарий Веретенников

Статья посвящена содержанию, общим принципам построения и характерным особенностям календаря, или месяцеслова, Русской Православной Церкви. Автор использует методы анализа и синтеза. В итоге делаются нижеследующие обобщения. Месяцеслов был принесён на Русь из Византии в достаточно завершённом виде, однако в процессе исторического развития он дополнился особенными русскими праздниками. Календарь-месяцеслов - это грандиозный собор святых, подвизавшихся в разных местах на протяжении веков, единение Церкви Небесной и земной, история святости и история нашей Церкви. Месяцесловным памятям посвящены составленные гимнографами богослужебные тексты, которые поются и читаются в храмах. Традиционно почитается день кончины угодников Божиих, память открытия мощей святых, перенесения их святых мощей или же день канонизации угодников Божиих, реже - день их рождения. Фенологические наблюдения русского народа связаны с повседневной деятельностью и увязаны с месяцесловом, что свидетельствует о его проникновении в повседневную жизнь русского человека. The article is devoted to the content, General principles of construction and characteristic features of the calendar, or mesyatseslov, of the Russian Orthodox Church. The author uses methods of analysis and synthesis. As a result, the following generalizations are made. The mesyatseslov was brought to Russia from Byzantium in a fairly complete form, but in the course of historical development it was supplemented with special Russian holidays. The calendar-mesyatseslov is a grandiose council of saints who have labored in different places over the centuries, the unity of the Church of Heaven and earth, the history of holiness and the history of our Church. Liturgical texts composed by hymnographers, which are sung and read in churches, are dedicated to the mesyatseslovs memory. Traditionally, the day of the death of saints, the memory of the discovery of the relics of saints, the transfer of their Holy relics, or the day of the canonization of saints, less often - the day of their birth are honored. Russian people’s phenological observations are related to their daily activities and are linked to mesyatseslov, which indicates its penetration into the daily life of the Russian people.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This chapter investigates changes in mentalities after the Black Death, comparing practices never before analysed in this context—funerary and labour laws and processions to calm God’s anger. While processions were rare or conflictual as in Catania and Messina in 1348, these rituals during later plagues bound communities together in the face of disaster. The chapter then turns to another trend yet to be noticed by historians. Among the multitude of saints and blessed ones canonized from 1348 to the eighteenth century, the Church was deeply reluctant to honour, even name, any of the thousands who sacrificed their lives to succour plague victims, physically or spiritually, especially in 1348: the Church recognized no Black Death martyrs. By the sixteenth century, however, city-wide processions and other communal rituals bound communities together with charity for the poor, works of art, and charitable displays of thanksgiving to long-dead holy men and women.


Author(s):  
Clive D. Field

Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, this book focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social influence of religion, in Britain. Particular emphasis is attached to the two key performance indicators of religious allegiance and churchgoing, each subsuming several sub-indicators, between 1880 and 1945, including the first substantive account of secularization during the fin de siècle. A wide range of primary sources is deployed, many relatively or entirely unknown, and with due regard to their methodological and interpretative challenges. On the back of them, a cross-cutting statistical measure of ‘active church adherence’ is devised, which clearly shows how secularization has been a reality and a gradual, not revolutionary, process. The most likely causes of secularization were an incremental demise of a Sabbatarian culture and of religious socialization (in the church, at home, and in the school). The analysis is also extended backwards, to include a summary of developments during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and laterally, to incorporate a preliminary evaluation of a six-dimensional model of ‘diffusive religion’, demonstrating that these alternative performance indicators have hitherto failed to prove that secularization has not occurred. The book is designed as a prequel to the author’s previous volumes on the chronology of British secularization – Britain’s Last Religious Revival? (2015) and Secularization in the Long 1960s (2017). Together, they offer a holistic picture of religious transformation in Britain during the key secularizing century of 1880–1980. [250 words]


Author(s):  
B. W. Young

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 102986492110152
Author(s):  
Carl Hopkins ◽  
Saúl Maté-Cid ◽  
Robert Fulford ◽  
Gary Seiffert ◽  
Jane Ginsborg

This study investigated the perception and learning of relative pitch using vibrotactile stimuli by musicians with and without a hearing impairment. Notes from C3 to B4 were presented to the fingertip and forefoot. Pre- and post-training tests in which 420 pairs of notes were presented randomly were carried out without any feedback to participants. After the pre-training test, 16 short training sessions were carried out over six weeks with 72 pairs of notes per session and participants told whether their answers were correct. For amateur and professional musicians with normal hearing and professional musicians with a severe or profound hearing loss, larger pitch intervals were easier to identify correctly than smaller intervals. Musicians with normal hearing had a high success rate for relative pitch discrimination as shown by pre- and post-training tests, and when using the fingertips, there was no significant difference between amateur and professional musicians. After training, median scores on the tests in which stimuli were presented to the fingertip and forefoot were >70% for intervals of 3–12 semitones. Training sessions reduced the variability in the responses of amateur and professional musicians with normal hearing and improved their overall ability. There was no significant difference between the relative pitch discrimination abilities between one and 11 semitones, as shown by the pre-training test, of professional musicians with and without a severe/profound hearing loss. These findings indicate that there is potential for vibration to be used to facilitate group musical performance and music education in schools for the deaf.


2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mª del Mar Bernabé-Villodre ◽  
Vladimir E. Martínez-Bello

According to International and European Law, teachers are encouraged to analyse, challenge and to help to eliminate sexist stereotypes and distortions in curricular materials. We aimed to characterize and compare the efficacy of implementation of the gender equality-based approach in the Spanish educational system, through a content analysis of the illustrations in music education (ME) textbooks following a coding scheme constructed by the research team according to guidelines from previous studies about the depiction of women and girls in ME textbooks during two periods of Spanish democracy: before (1992–2005); and after (2006–2015). Our major findings were: (a) female characters were under-represented in both time periods studied; (b); the stereotype of women as amateur but not professional musicians is not perpetuated in the current primary ME textbooks; (c) both children and adults independently of gender were portrayed interacting with others; (d) despite the fact that women teachers are actively participating in schools, ME textbooks do not faithfully reflect that reality; and (e) the virtual absence of females and males with disabilities suggests that this aspect of inclusion is still pending. Notwithstanding, ME textbooks printed after 2006 tended to challenge some traditional stereotypes pertaining to how females and males think, play and act within the musical world.


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