Piano culture of South and Latin America: features of formation and transformation

The purpose of the article involves a thorough study of the original sources of the emergence in Latin and South America of such an instrument as the piano. In addition, it is necessary to trace the historical stages of the transformation of the composer’s style — from European classical to a new ideological and artistic musical embodiment of a specific Latin American culture. The methodology. The main research method in the article is based on next principals: cultural-historical, comparative-typological, structural, analysis and synthesis and ascent from the abstract to the concrete. The results. The conducted historical and musical analysis revealed the importance of the piano for the formation of the musical culture of South and Latin America. Thanks to touring artists from Europe, the piano gradually gained popularity. Its evolution has gone from European imitation to the formation of its own identity in world music culture. The path of Latin and South American composers to national identity took place through rethinking and interpreting the musical styles of past eras (baroque, classicism, romanticism) and folklore. During the period of experiments, study and introduction of national cultural elements, piano works by composers of Latin and South America had a high level of professionalism and popularity. The scientific novelty. It is that the work is a comprehensive scientific study, which substantiates a holistic system of evolution and transformation of piano culture in South and Latin America. The practical significance. The materials of the article can be used in further research on the phenomenon of Latin America piano culture, as well as in classes on the history of piano art and world music history.

African Past, American Future: Uplift Ideology in Early 20th Century Opera

This paper explores how two African American composers, Scott Joplin (c. 1868-1917) and Harry Lawrence Freeman (1869-1954), advocated for Black Advancement and uplift ideology through their syncretic operas in the early 1900s. What is presented here however is the introductory content of a larger work. Joplin and Freeman were intimately conscious and supportive of national debates for Black Advancement, propelled especially by W.E.B. DuBois, and both employed rhetorical strategies paradigmatic of the movement. They were both interested in showing White and Black Americans alike that African American music, such as gospel, spiritual, and ragtime, could be held to the same high esteem as music of the Western canon, just as Black academics often endeavored to prove their intellectual prowess to their White counterparts. To this end, Joplin and Freeman combined “Black” music and classical styles in their operas to declare the equality and richness of an integrated sound. The thematic content of these operas, Treemonisha and Voodoo, respectively, interact with the Black Advancement movement’s drive for progress and education as well. They present Black Americans’ struggle for modernity as a conflict between the “superstitious” West African religious customs still ingrained in emancipated communities and Christianity. However, Joplin and Freeman’s works diverge aesthetically and ideologically from this point forward. Joplin’s aesthetic considerations derived chiefly from ragtime, a modern African American musical form genre, while Freeman took inspiration not only from African ethnic music but Africa itself. Joplin’s form of uplift was found in the education of small Black communities, while Freeman framed his work in a nationalistic and pan-Africanist context. These distinct choices, though crafted with the same aim, help reveal subtle divergences in argumentation within the Black Advancement movement.

The Brewing Storm

A small number of US-based composers began experimenting with the use of African American vernacular music as the basis for instrumental works around 1880, arguing that this music formed a truly American folk repertoire. Their works found public favor in the United States and, more importantly, in several European cities in the months leading up to Dvořák’s arrival as director of the National Conservatory. Dvořák’s own position in the debate about American national style was an open question until May 1893, when he revealed his belief in the authentic American identity of Black vernacular music, thus affirming the approach of earlier American composers.

Horizons

The downtown marathons of Bang on a Can might seem worlds away from the American symphony orchestra, but in the mid-1980s they shared a common context: David Lang worked for the New York Philharmonic in this period as an assistant to composer-in-residence Jacob Druckman. His assistantship was part of the granting organization Meet the Composer’s Orchestra Residencies Program, which placed American composers in residencies with symphony orchestras and fundamentally reshaped the relationship between new music and the marketplace. The program’s most high-profile success, the Philharmonic’s 1983 Horizons festival, captured an unprecedented audience for new music via its heavily publicized theme of “A New Romanticism?” And Lang’s subsequent work with the Philharmonic provided him with experience and connections, as well as a growing ambivalence toward the orchestral sphere that shaped the maverick mindset of Bang on a Can.

Krzysztof Knittel's chamber opera and Agnieszka Stulgińska's music theatre: Examples of a new syncretistic medium in contemporary Polish music

This essay analyses and interprets the scores, recordings, and media used in Knittel and King's The Heart Piece - Double Opera (1999) and Stulgińska's Three Women for three women and ten instruments (2017), two semi-improvised Polish operas using performance art and interaction between sound, text, choreography, lighting, theatrical form and electronic medium. In Stuglińska's modern music theatre, the listener follows different sound sources and the setting: choreography, performers' and speakers' arrangement on stage, props and lighting, whose intensity dictates the form. The Heart Piece chamber opera is a two - Polish and American - composers' take on Müller's play Herzstück, with separate movements in their native languages. Music and text create an interactive setting, and their notation and semantics make music both seen and heard. These works use the concept of hybridization and, in Wolf's terminology, intracompositional intermediality, where different means of expression create an intermedial discourse, a complementary whole and a new syncretistic medium.

Romantic Style in American Music and Its Place in Courses of Disciplines of Universities of Culture and Art

in the development of American music of the 19th century, researchers find stylistic trends in romanticism. During this period, the characteristic features of national musical thinking and the features of the composer’s work of US composers manifest themselves. A similar thing was observed in European music of the same century: the Polish national composer school was formed in Chopin’s works, Liszt embodied the features of Hungarian music, Grieg – Norwegian, etc. Since the beginning of the 19th century, American composers have been passionate about European romantic trends, but at the same time they have gone and developed along their special path. The influence of Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn is felt in the works of American composers of the mid-19th century, in the literature of the USA romanticism manifested itself much earlier, and its development was peculiar and special due to the ethnic and historical development of the country. However, all these most important historical pages still remain almost without the attention of scholars, researchers, and are also absent from the courses of music history not only colleges, but also universities of art culture. In this work, an attempt is made to outline ways to master the artistic and creative experience of composers of the USA of the 19th century in the process of studying professional disciplines by students of universities of culture and art and at the same time enriching the scientific experience of musicology with new discoveries in the field of American romantic music.

The Closing and Lasting Impact of CLAEM

This chapter evaluates the conditions leading to the closing of CLAEM and the impact the center as a whole had on the Latin American art music scene. Touching upon the three main themes of the book, the chapter discusses the lessons learned and the weaknesses revealed from the most significant philanthropic incursion into avant-garde art music in Latin America, and the lasting legacy of a generation of fellowship holders, both in terms of their embrace or rejection of the avant-garde, and their adoption of an identification as Latin American composers based on strong and intimate social bonds. It argues that the impact that the relatively short-lived center had during the following fifty years on the classical music of the region was the result of calculated philanthropic efforts, the embodied and multi-faceted embrace of avant-garde ideas, and the conscious and strategic construction and identification of Latin American composers.

Sacred Music

Bristow served as a church organist and choir director for most of his professional life, in almost a dozen different churches (1840s-1890s). The type of music performed in churches on holy days is readily available; what was heard on regular Sundays is mostly unknown. A 1906 publication about music at Manhattan’s Trinity Church, however, is instructive about both types of services. Bristow programmed compositions by both European and American composers, especially on holy days; this indicates his continued support for fellow composers. He wrote numerous sacred works for organ (interludes, voluntaries, various pieces) and voice (anthems, sentences, services, hymns, songs, offertories, and oratorios).

George Frederick Bristow

George Frederick Bristow (1825-1898), a pillar of the nineteenth-century New York musical community, was educated, lived, and worked in New York for his entire life. A skilled performer (piano, organ, violin, conducting), he was a decades-long member of the Philharmonic Societies of New York and Brooklyn, and conducted the Harmonic Society, Mendelssohn Union, numerous church choirs, and pickup choral and instrumental ensembles organized for special events. He taught music privately and in the public school system. Bristow’s professional activities were those of a highly skilled urban journeyman musician--typical of many who worked in America during the period. Bristow was a steadfast and outspoken supporter of American composers throughout his career. This started in 1854 with his participation--along with William Henry Fry and editor Richard Storrs Willis--in a months-long journalistic battle that centered on the Philharmonic Society’s lack of support for American composers, an activity that has dominated his historical reputation. But he was also a prolific composer: of five symphonies, two oratorios, an opera, many secular and sacred choral pieces, chamber music, songs, and works for piano and organ. As a quiet and self-effacing individual, Bristow was not a self-promoter. But many of his contemporaries regarded him as a skilled performer, a generous colleague, and the most important American classical composer during much of the mid-century period.