Elliott Carter's Late Music

The first comprehensive study of the late music of one of the most influential composers of the last half century, this book places Elliott Carter's music from 1995 to 2012 in the broader context of post-war contemporary concert music, including his own earlier work. It addresses Carter's reception history, his aesthetics, and his harmonic and rhythmic practice, and includes detailed essays on all of Carter's major works after 1995. Special emphasis is placed on Carter's settings of contemporary modernist poetry from John Ashbery to Louis Zukofsky. In readable and engaging prose, Elliott Carter's Late Music illuminates a body of late work that stands at the forefront of the composer's achievements.

New Music versus New Wave

This chapter offers a reception history of Big Science, showing the ways listeners constellated the album within fields of genre. In doing so, it offers a definition of genre that differentiates between concerns of audience and concerns of style, framing generic tags as the provisional result of ongoing negotiations between musical stakeholders. In particular, the chapter asks how listeners heard Big Science as either new music or new wave. It unpacks the aesthetics and underlying ethics of both of those genres, highlighting their overlap in concerns of timbre, race, gender, geography, and low-context aesthetics.

Laurie Anderson's Big Science

Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson’s Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the challenging and strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of “now” when time is always moving? How do experiences become memories? This book attends closely to Anderson’s artistic voice, detailing its unique capacities for ambiguity and revelation. It traces the sonic histories etched in the record’s grooves, from the Cold War to a burning future, from the Manhattan skyline to the empty desert, from the opera house to the pop charts. Ultimately, in Big Science, one can hear an invitation to rise above the dualities of parts and wholes, images and essences, the lone individual and the megasystem. The first and most enduring superstar of performance art, Anderson is recognized here for pioneering philosophically rich techniques within the medium but is also taken seriously as a musician and composer. Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day.

Maelzel, the Metronome, and the Modern Mechanics of Musical Time

Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, despite being most recognized today for inventing the clockwork metronome, was one of the most famous automata showmen of the nineteenth century. This chapter begins by offering a reception history of Maelzel, the metronome, and his automata, and exploring the cultural significances underlying his clockwork creations across the Industrial Age. As numerous accounts maintain, Maelzel’s automata projected decidedly inhuman performance practices. His automata emblematized a machine culture that ran in direct opposition to the subjective ‘artistry’ championed by many skilled performers and composers over the century. This study subsequently addresses the discord between Maelzel’s age and ours regarding the values of musical time and performance practices: those metronomic qualities largely rejected by Maelzel’s musical contemporaries are often vehemently endorsed today by many professional musicians and educators who apply mechanically precise tempos and rhythms to all musical repertoires. This history ultimately confronts the veiled ‘metronome mentality’ found throughout contemporary performance culture, which neglects many musical-temporal aesthetics and rhythmic qualities from a pre-industrial, pre-metronomic past.

'Something entirely new': A Critical History of An Béal Bocht, 1941–75

This article reconstructs an early reception of Brian Ó Nualláin’s An Béal Bocht (1941) in which the novel was hailed as a breakthrough work that advanced the Irish-language prose tradition and promised to win new readers of Irish. The story of how this initial enthusiasm hardened into a critical diminishment of Ó Nualláin’s achievement as an obscure parody involves the author’s own efforts to associate the novel with Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An tOileánach, the dampening of the optimism which surrounded the Irish language in the 1940s, and the impact of Patrick C. Power’s translation, The Poor Mouth, on how An Béal Bocht was understood. By charting the evolution of An Béal Bocht’s reception history, this article furthers contemporary scholarship on the promise Ó Nualláin’s novel still holds for Irish-language prose.

New Insights into Papyrus Millingen and the Reception History of The Teaching of Amenemhat

This article examines Papyrus Millingen, an important but now-lost manuscript of The Teaching of Amenemhat. The papyrus survives today in a nineteenth century facsimile, which was last published in black and white photographs in 1963. This article presents new color photographs of the facsimile, along with hieroglyphic transcription and philological commentary, which discusses not only the text but also what the facsimile’s paratextual features suggest about the ancient and modern copying processes. P. Millingen’s version of Amenemhat is contextualized within the full corpus of surviving copies of the poem. The article proposes several possible social contexts for the manuscript’s production and usage and considers the impact of those contexts, along with broader cultural trends of the Eighteenth Dynasty, on the papyrus owner’s reception of Amenemhat.