Edwin Booth: A Biography and Performance History by Arthur W. Bloom, and: American Tragedian: The Life of Edwin Booth by Daniel J. Watermeier

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-129
Author(s):  
Rosemarie K. Bank
Keyword(s):  
Performance History ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Edwin Booth

Edwin Booth: a biography and performance history

2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (05) ◽  
pp. 51-2579-51-2579
Keyword(s):  
Performance History ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Edwin Booth

Sweet Echo

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-202
Author(s):  
Katherine R. Larson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Level Of Detail ◽  
British Library ◽  
Classroom Discussions ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Performance Context ◽  
Acoustic Impact ◽  
And Performance

Although music was integral to masques, the genre’s visual extravagance tends to overshadow its acoustic elements in scholarly and classroom discussions. This chapter focuses on “Sweet Echo,” the Lady’s song in Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), which was performed in 1634 by 15-year-old Alice Egerton. The unusual level of detail that survives about this masque’s performance history, combined with the musical settings extant in Henry Lawes’s autograph manuscript, now held at the British Library, facilitates a suggestive evaluation of early modern song in terms of the rhetorical interplay between lyric, musical setting, and performance context. It also constitutes a striking case study for considering the acoustic impact of women’s singing voices. Milton’s depiction of temptation and self-discipline in Comus, whose moral message is encapsulated in miniature in the Lady’s performance of “Sweet Echo,” hinges on his audience’s experience of song as an acoustic, embodied, and gendered phenomenon.

“An Essential Expression of the People”: Interpretations of Hasidic Song in the Composition and Performance History of Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem

2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-820 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Music ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

Abstract This article examines Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Life, considering its score, its performance history, and early recordings of the second movement, “Nigun,” by Yehudi Menuhin, Joseph Szigeti, and Mischa Elman, to investigate the idea, promoted by the composer and many of his performers and critics, that the music represented Jewish identity through the evocation of Hasidic song. Bloch's score and Menuhin's performances were described as expressing what was often characterized during the early twentieth century as a self-affirming racial feeling that linked the modern diaspora in America to Eastern European Hasidic Jewish communities. With Baal Shem, Bloch and his performers and listeners participated in a self-conscious effort to construct a modern Jewish identity that they believed could be conveyed in the sounds and structures of art music. Menuhin's lifelong friendship and collaboration with Bloch underscores the crucial roles of Bloch's performers in working with the composer to devise compositional and performance tropes for the representation of Hasidic song, and in creating his broad reputation as a composer of a definitive Jewish music, a reputation Bloch would sometimes embrace and at other times disavow.

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