„Odgadnąć i uzewnętrznić wielką tajemnicę […] Chopinowskiej muzyki” – Dusze niektórych melodii. Chopin Cezarego Jellenty

The article constitutes a detailed analysis and interpretation of one of the most important texts written at the turn of the twentieth century, which was devoted to the reception and interpretation of Frédéric Chopin’s compositions in the Young Poland period. In his work, Cezary Jellenta presents the nervous perception of the Polish composer’s music typical of the era and refers in his reflections to numerous works of painting and both Polish and world literature, which perfectly illustrates the fascination with the idea of the correspondence of arts. It is also a testimony to the foundations of the emerging music criticism and evidence of the undying adoration for Frédéric Chopin’s works.

Zwischen Ost und West: Franz Liszts nationale Identität in der Wiener Musikkritik (1857–1900)

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Habsburg Monarchy was a political entity giving home to great numbers of people of different nationalities and ethnicities. However, the dominant power in the structure of this multi-ethnic state was reserved for the Germans. Yet, the ever more emphatic demands of ethnic groups of other origins for more autonomy had a serious impact on the political and cultural supremacy of the Germans. Based on this recorded background, I will examine in the context of my paper to what extent Viennese music criticism of Franz Liszt’s symphonic programme music proves to be influenced by the reception of his national facets of identity. To do justice to this concern, the first step is to gain an overview of what statements were made during the journalistic discourse on Liszt’s symphonic programme music regarding its nationality. Building on this, it will be determined what function these statements had in the argumentative mediation of the aesthetic judgement on Liszt’s programmatic compositions. Against the political background outlined above, the question arises as to whether the Hungarian-national facet of Liszt’s identity in particular was instrumentalized by Viennese critics in order to strengthen negative judgments about his œuvre by means of a politically motivated German-nationalist narrative.

The Public Music Theory of George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw is best known today for his plays, but he first exercised his incisive wit as a drama and music critic in London, intermittently from 1876, regularly from 1888 to 1894, and intermittently again to the end of his life. Shaw explicitly intended to make his reviews both educational and accessible to the general public, combining performance critiques with broader considerations, including aspects of music theory and music education, and avoiding technical terms to the extent possible. Thus, his music criticism serves as an example of public music theory. This chapter surveys Shaw’s music-theoretic comments through this lens, analyzing what they demonstrate about his own musical understanding and underlying ideologies, the educational purpose of his reviews, and the level of musical knowledge he assumed on the part of his late nineteenth-century London readership.

Hans Keller and the Media of Analysis

Developed in the late 1950s, Hans Keller’s method of “functional analysis” (FA) sought to analyze music in audible form, without verbal argument or conceptual labels. Keller composed analytical interludes which repeated, recontextualized, and recomposed recognizable thematic and rhythmic elements from the compositions he studied, and placed them in between the movements of those works in live performances or radio broadcasts. Drawing on early twentieth-century music analysis, mid-century media theory, and recent studies of analysis for performance, this chapter reads Keller’s early analyses against a series of annual updates he published, chronicling FA’s development from a polemical philosophy of music criticism to a dynamic mode of wordless musical argument.

Locating stylistics in the discipline of English studies: a case study analysis of A.E. Housman’s ‘From Far, from Eve and Morning’

Literary stylistics, whose subject matter is literary language, straddles the disciplines of literary criticism and linguistics, as Henry Widdowson pointed out 45 years ago. Since then, developments in discourse analysis and multimodal studies have had the potential to expand the map of the interactions between different disciplines. This case study performs a traditional stylistic analysis of the poem ‘From Far, from Eve and Morning’ from A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad but also demonstrates the potential for a multimodal perspective on stylistics by relating it to a musical analysis of Vaughan-Williams’ setting of the poem. It begins with a linguistic analysis of phonology, graphology and punctuation, lexis, phrase structure, clause structure and clausal semantics. It proceeds to a discourse analysis of pragmatics and discourse structure. And it ends by relating the linguistic and discoursal analysis to the music through music criticism. By way of conclusion, it suggests that both linguistic analysis and appreciation of musical structure and mood are useful ways into Spitzer’s philological circle, by which linguistic analysis and musical appreciation can pave the way for literary appreciation.

THE MERGING OF MUSIC CRITICISM AND MUSIC PROMOTION: CONVERGED MUSIC INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS ON FACEBOOK

This paper explores the changing socio-cultural dynamic between local music entrepreneurs and journalists/critics on Facebook in Estonia. Through the analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews with music industry professionals and experts and observations of their activities on Facebook, the study identifies the decreasing distance between music criticism and music promotion. On the one hand, the music critics once envisioned as ‘autonomous gatekeepers’ (Hirsch, 1972) find it increasingly hard to transfer their musical authority, expertise and perceived independence to the commercially driven social media environment. As a result, some of them have taken up entrepreneurship themselves, converged their various identities by mixing their critical/evaluative practices as critics and business-oriented practices as entrepreneurs. On the other hand, some niche music entrepreneurs are stepping into the role of cultural authorities by mobilizing and catering to specific taste cultures and genre communities by becoming expert gatekeepers in their own right, despite being compromised by their business interest. In this context, it is no more useful to talk about the ‘mutual dependency’ of the music press and industry PR (Forde, 2001; Negus, 1992). Rather, among the tightly interwoven music scenes like the ones in Estonia, where many players adopt a variety of different and often conflicting roles (especially on Facebook), we should recognize the complete convergence of music promotion and music criticism and the loss of critical distance and autonomy altogether.

The emergence of promotional gatekeeping and converged local music professionals on social media

The digitalization of creative industries has undermined the business models of legacy media outlets as well as the music industries. This article discusses the two primary ways that legacy media has functioned in the context of the music industries—as a producer of symbolic value and as an engine of music promotion. However, the central aim of this study is to analyze the development of these functions in the new media sphere by identifying music promotion practices on Facebook. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with local music industry professionals in Estonia, two sets of promotional approaches have been identified: brand-centered approaches and community-oriented approaches. The findings indicate a continuing convergence of autonomous music criticism and music promotion across many dimensions and the presence of “promotional gatekeeping” as a form of business activity in small creative industries.