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.

HEADLESS MUSICAL SEEDS AND GESTURES WITH ADJECTIVES: AN INTERVIEW WITH KEIKO DEVAUX

Keiko Devaux (b. 1982) is a Canadian composer, originally from British Columbia, who now lives in Montréal. She began her musical career in piano-performance studies as well as composing, touring and recording several albums in independent rock bands. Her concert music is widely performed throughout Canada and Europe. From 2016–18, Keiko was the composer in residence of Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. She joined Salvatore Sciarrino's masterclasses at L'Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy, between the years 2017 and 2019. Keiko was commissioned by music@villaromana festival, Florence, to create Echoic Memories. She is the inaugural winner of the Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music (2020) and is also engaged in a two-year residency as a Carrefour composer with the National Arts Centre Orchestra (2020–22). This interview was conducted over Zoom in late spring 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Viennese Ballroom in the Age of Beethoven

The repertoire of the early Viennese ballroom was highly influential in the broader histories of both social dance and music in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet music scholarship has traditionally paid little attention to ballroom dance music before the era of the Strauss dynasty, with the exception of a handful of dances by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. This book positions Viennese social dances in their specific performing contexts and investigates the wider repertoire of the Viennese ballroom in the decades around 1800, most of which stems from dozens of non-canonical composers. Close examination of this material yields new insights into the social contexts associated with familiar dance types, and reveals that the ballroom repertoire of this period connected with virtually every aspect of Viennese musical life, from opera and concert music to the emerging category of entertainment music that was later exemplified by the waltzes of Lanner and Strauss.

Music and Baseball Talks at Cooperstown

This chapter summarizes seven public music theory presentations at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Topics include Charles Ives’s sketches and completed music about baseball and ballplayers, the popular song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a seminar on historical and contemporary baseball music, Casey at the Bat for band and narrator, major league walk-up and entrance music, and branding ball clubs through music. The chapter describes ways to draw musical meaning from music analysis as a fulfilling way for music theorists to connect their work with public audiences through engagement with music from specific social and cultural contexts. These approaches involve both concert music and contemporary popular music and include music that illustrates or celebrates baseball situations as well as music heard at ballparks.

Whose History?: The Americas and Music Curricula in the United States

One moment from the much-discussed 2017 curriculum reform in the Music Department at Harvard University has stuck with me and transformed the way I approach teaching music in higher education. In one of the meetings leading up to the revision, graduate students in the department led an activity in which attendees—who included undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty alike—got into small groups and discussed the relative merits of three hypothetical models for the new undergraduate curriculum. Each of the models involved decentering to some extent the existing curriculum's emphasis on the history of Western European music and dominant music theoretical approaches to it. After a short while, we all gathered back together and one person from each group shared a bit about what had transpired. From the circle of desks nearest the door, an undergraduate student rose to speak and expressed enthusiasm for a broadening of curricular coverages. But, they said, their group also had some reservations about jettisoning the overall focus on Western European concert music altogether. “We still need to learn about our history,” they said, while a faculty member nodded behind them.

Bernard Herrmann

Bernard Herrmann (b. 1911–d. 1975) was a prolific American composer and conductor, known primarily for his work in film. He was also active, however, as a composer for radio and television, had written music for the concert and operatic stage, and had a prodigious conducting career later in his life. The majority of the current research on his oeuvre focuses on his film scoring and his collaborations with film directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, François Truffaut, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma. He started producing scores for films in 1941, with Welles for the film Citizen Kane, and died just after completing his work for Taxi Driver (dir. Scorsese, 1976). Prior to his experience in cinema, Herrmann wrote music for hundreds of radio dramas starting in the 1930s and continuing until the 1950s, which he credited for his ability to compose so readily for cinema. Herrmann’s most famous collaboration was with Hitchcock, which began with the film The Trouble with Harry (1955) and ended with Marnie (1964). The director-composer duo had a falling out in 1966 over Herrmann’s score to Torn Curtain, which Hitchcock refused to use; the director instead hired John Addison to replace Herrmann. Herrmann went on to compose scores for films by Truffaut, Scorsese, and De Palma in the 1960s and 1970s. While composing for cinema, Herrmann also wrote stock music for television, mainly for CBS, throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Herrmann also conducted concert and film music on several recordings released from 1966 through 1976, including some of his own concert works. In addition to an extraordinary output for film, radio, television, and recording, Herrmann also wrote concert music, some of which he considered most dear. He composed orchestral, ballet, and vocal music throughout his life, starting in his teens and until his death. His opera Wuthering Heights (1951) was especially important to him. In interviews, especially later in life, Herrmann emphasized that he was a composer of music—not one restricted to only film music—and even then, he regarded film music to be equal to that for the concert stage.

From the Church to the Concert Hall

‘Every room in which Bach is performed is transformed into a church.’ We do not know the context for this remark attributed to Mendelssohn (sometime before March 1835), but it reflects one significant thread in the nineteenth-century ‘emancipation of music’, namely the revival of the music of J.S. Bach, and his transformation from a largely forgotten Leipzig church musician into a dominant, canonic figure in European concert music. This chapter revisits some familiar aspects of Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s music, for example the seminal revival of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829, and Mendelssohn’s spiritual trajectory from Judaism to Christianity, and then explores ways in which his own music tested boundaries between sacred music for performance in church versus the concert hall. One way in which Mendelssohn allied his music with the spiritual was through the use of imaginary, ‘free’ chorales—that is, newly composed, textless chorale melodies that he inserted into a number of his purely instrumental compositions as a means of underscoring his newly acquired Protestant faith. The chapter concludes by exploring the significance of this device for several other nineteenth-century composers who similarly invoked the divine and sacred in their concert music

Modifications in the Topological Structure of EEG Functional Connectivity Networks during Listening Tonal and Atonal Concert Music in Musicians and Non-Musicians

The present work aims to demonstrate the hypothesis that atonal music modifies the topological structure of electroencephalographic (EEG) connectivity networks in relation to tonal music. To this, EEG monopolar records were taken in musicians and non-musicians while listening to tonal, atonal, and pink noise sound excerpts. EEG functional connectivities (FC) among channels assessed by a phase synchronization index previously thresholded using surrogate data test were computed. Sound effects, on the topological structure of graph-based networks assembled with the EEG-FCs at different frequency-bands, were analyzed throughout graph metric and network-based statistic (NBS). Local and global efficiency normalized (vs. random-network) measurements (NLE|NGE) assessing network information exchanges were able to discriminate both music styles irrespective of groups and frequency-bands. During tonal audition, NLE and NGE values in the beta-band network get close to that of a small-world network, while during atonal and even more during noise its structure moved away from small-world. These effects were attributed to the different timbre characteristics (sounds spectral centroid and entropy) and different musical structure. Results from networks topographic maps for strength and NLE of the nodes, and for FC subnets obtained from the NBS, allowed discriminating the musical styles and verifying the different strength, NLE, and FC of musicians compared to non-musicians.

Reading Textural Functions, Instrumental Techniques, and Space Through Partition Complexes

Partitional complexes are sets of discrete textural configurations (called shortly of partitions in Partition Analysis) that successfully interact to construct a global textural structure. This textural mode is called the Textural Proposal of a piece, where referential partitions (those that represent the main features of textural configurations in the excerpt) stand out. This conceptual environment, developed in musical texture formalization through observation and musical repertoire analysis, is now applied to musical practice. In the present work, we highlight three of these situations. The first one deals with the creative flow (compositional process) and its relation with textural planning. The second observes how these same textural functions condition the body's physical coupling to the instrument (fingers, hands, pedals, instrumentation). Finally, just as an introduction, we envisage some spatial relations, involving instrument distribution on stage, emphasizing historical concert music.