A nostalgic return to the past or sound searching? On the use of contemporary harpsichords in early music performance

The article is based on the materials used for the author’s doctoral dissertation entitled Contemporary performance of 17th century German harpsichord toccatas in the context of instrument selection. Its main part is an analysis of the changes which occured in the harpsichord builiding before the end of the 19th century and the change in approach to early music at the beginning of the 20th century. The article is an attempt to answer the question to which extent instrument selection determines our today’s performance. Is it only a harpsichord being an exact copy of historical instruments that allows us to deliver an authentic and fresh interpretation? While listening to 20th century harpsichordists playing 20th century instruments (i.e., using contemporary models, not historically-based), we discover a different world of early music, which may even be more experimental than today’s performance sound-wise. It seems that the openness towards contemporary harpsichords while preserving historical practices at the same time may help discover new sound qualities in early music pieces.

A Reconstruction of Late Renaissance Music in Nono's Prometeo

This paper attempts to stress that the composer Luigi Nono never overlooked early music, particularly Renaissance music, and his avant-garde works were created on the basis of late Renaissance and early Baroque music. Furthermore, this paper has tried to shed light on the relationship between music and space, which was an essential parameter of musical composition in the twentieth century as well as in the Renaissance. The sound modulated by live electronics transports the listener into synesthetic and perceptive listening and sonic space. As a result, it is demonstrated that Nono indicated the power and fascination of the voice, the polychoral structure, and the influence of the interaction between sound and space in his Prometeo.

Concepts of the Renaissance, c. 1780–c. 1920

As time passes, history has been divided and subdivided, the ancient and the modern separated by the medieval, the modern succeeded by the post-modern. If the 19th century, its science, industry and innovation was “modern,” could it really be only one step along the evolutionary path from “medieval” superstition? The concept of the Renaissance provided a neat transition, European society and culture renewing itself, reviving itself after centuries of “medieval” gloom, thereby giving birth to the modern world. The 19th-century renaissance of the Renaissance has proved to be a fruitful area of study, as indicated by numerous Reference Works and Overviews, and confirmed by Broader Surveys, Collections of Papers and Journals. After those general categories, the present article adopts a roughly chronological pattern beginning with Rinascita before “Renaissance” in the late 18th and early 19th century. Thereafter geographical divisions emerge, first with Romanticism and Renaissance in France and then The Arts in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain. The section c. 1860 has been created to highlight works contemporary with and often overshadowed by the most influential concept of the Renaissance, that of Jacob Burckhardt (b. 1819–d. 1897), whose significance requires that Burckhardt and His Legacy be divided into Texts and Analysis, with an additional subsection on the museum director Wilhelm von Bode. Burchkardt’s Kultur der Renaissance in Italien was published in 1860, but at the risk of confusion is cited as Burckhardt 1990 in the present article. It made relatively little impact during its creator’s lifetime, enabling Pater, Symonds, and Their Contemporaries to establish their own concepts of the Renaissance. By the 1880s the Renaissance was so clearly accepted as something centered on Italy and its visual arts that enthusiasts flocked there, some taking up permanent residence as Expatriates in Italy. Meanwhile, French, German, and British concepts of the Renaissance found echoes in Other Nations. Renaissance Artists and Their Cults—the term is deliberate, reflecting an unprecedented mania—were increasingly apparent as the 19th century passed, and in turn encouraged a Renaissance emphasis in the International Art Market. Thereafter, Architecture and Horticulture is the fifth consecutive section to include works by, about, or inspired by Bernard Berenson (b. 1865–d. 1959). Music accounts for appropriate aspects of the early music revival, while Histories and Biographies identifies use of the term “Renaissance” in other subject areas. Enthusiasm for the Renaissance was characteristic of the Belle Époque, so the final section of this article inquires after The Waning of the Renaissance? in the decade of the First World War.

Bach and the Soprano Voice

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.

Zu einigen Aktivitäten der Digital Musicology auf dem Gebiet der Älteren Musik

This paper discusses some of the increasing activities in the field of digital musicology. The focus being on early music prior to 1600 doesn't mean that the questions and methods presented here can't be applied to other periods or to musicology in general. However, particularly early music seems to profit in a special way by the use of digital methods, especially in the fields of notation history, transmission of manuscripts and performance practice. The paper presents an overview over various projects, approaches and techniques that were developed in recent years or that are still under development. It covers the fields of music encoding and visualization, digital editing, reconstruction of manuscripts and libraries, of melodies and parts, of virtual sound spaces and historical tuning and how this will open up new horizons for research in early music history.

Anne Smith, Ina Lohr (1903-1983). Transcending the Boundaries of Early Music

This is a book that had to be written. And that is meant in a thoroughly positive way. Ina Lohr, ‘Paul Sacher's assistant’, is a well-known figure in insider circles, who contributed immensely to the creation of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, one of the most important international teaching institutions for Early Music and historically informed performance practice. Lohr made a significant contribution to the emergence of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, which made a name for itself not only in Early Music but also, through regular commissions from the Sacher-family, in the field of New Music as yet another unique Basel contribution to the international music life. However, the exact nature of the contributions of Lohr is not entirely clear even to locals and insiders who did have the privilege of meeting her themselves. Especially, her own compositional activity has so far been carefully left out of the prevailing ‘image’ of the conservatively dressed and coiffed Lohr who taught ‘house music courses’ (the name of teacher training at the time).

Using a developmental-ecological approach to understand the relation between language and music

Neurocognitive and genetic approaches have made progress in understanding language-music interaction in the adult brain. Although there is broad agreement that learning processes affect how we represent, comprehend, and produce language and music, there is little understanding of the content and dynamics of the early language-music environment in the first years of life. A developmental-ecological approach sees learning and development as fundamentally embedded in a child’s environment, and thus requires researchers to move outside of the lab to understand what children are seeing, hearing, and doing in their daily lives. In this paper, after first reviewing the limitations of traditional developmental approaches to understanding language-music interaction, we describe how a developmental-ecological approach can inform not only developmental theories of language-music learning, but also contemporary neurocognitive and genetic approaches. We then make suggestions for how researchers can best use the developmental-ecological approach to understand the similarities, differences, and co-occurrences in early music and language input.

Making Music and a New Life

This chapter reviews Esther Lederberg’s life in music. Researchers who study multiple intelligences have observed an overlap between musical and linguistic intelligence. Esther Lederberg’s mastery of foreign languages would have given her confidence to independently master the recorder. Her enthusiasm for music resonated with her French colleagues, Jacob and Monod, at the Institut Pasteur. Probably the most famous musician/scientist of the twentieth century was Albert Einstein, who admitted that if he hadn’t become a physicist, he would have become a musician. In the 1960s, Early Music—of the Renaissance and Baroque eras—enjoyed an international revival. In 1962, Esther Lederberg and some like-minded amateur musicians founded the Mid-Peninsula Recorder Orchestra (MPRO). She performed with the MPRO for over forty years. This shift in her social circle marked a new phase of personal growth toward music and the arts. Drawn together by a shared passion for music, Matthew Simon and Esther Lederberg married in 1993.

Den kvinnliga sopranen i barockrepertoaren

The artistic doctoral project of soprano Kajsa Dahlbäck is in two parts. The theme of the concert series is “The female soprano within the baroque repertoire 1600–1750” and that of the thesis is “Singing-in-the-world – a phenomenological study on the singer’s inner work”. In her concerts, Dahlbäck has performed music from different parts of Europe and particularly from communities with female singers, such as for instance Italian nun convents, Vivaldi’s time at La Pietà in Venice and the court of Swedish Queen Christina in Stockholm and Rome. In her thesis, Dahlbäck shares insights from her experience as a singer specializing in early music as well as the genre’s generally intimate concert and rehearsal atmosphere. Experience texts from rehearsals and concerts have been mirrored against phenomenological theories. The practice-based triadic concept of body–breath– mind is linked to the theoretical singing-in-the-world. Body–breath–mind is the foundation for singing-in-the-world, a synthesis of the phenomenological tradition of Heidegger’s being- in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein), Merleau-Ponty’s being toward-the-world (suis à) and in recent years Škof and Berndtson’s breathing-in-the-world.