El Concierto para Oboe y pequeña Orquesta en re mayor Op. 144 (trV 292) de Richard Strauss. Análisis y estudio del fraseo en la exposición del primer movimiento / The Concert in D major for oboe and small orchestra Op. 144 (TrV 292) of Richard Strauss. Analysis and study phrasing in the first movement

A través de este artículo se analiza el fraseo utilizado por Richard Strauss en la exposición del primer movimiento del Concierto para oboe y pequeña orquesta en remayor Op. 144 (TrV 292) en su edición de 1948. La razón de este acercamiento se debe a que por sus características, el fraseo en esta obra exige al oboísta agilidad, flexibilidad y, especialmente, un gran control de la respiración para que su interpretación no lo conduzca a un estado total de agotamiento.

Adaskin, Murray (1906–2002)

Born in Toronto, Ontario and passing in Victoria, British Columbia, Murray Adaskin was a violinist, composer, and academic whose music was widely performed in Canada. Adaskin was violinist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 1926–36, and held senior academic and administrative positions at the University of Saskatchewan (1952–73) and the Canada Council for the Arts (1966–69). His compositional style largely avoids allegiance to modern and experimental currents of the twentieth century, balancing conservatism and lyricality with atonal and folk elements. An expedition to Canada’s arctic to record Inuit singing in 1965 proved influential to Adaskin, resulting in several works including Qala and Nilaula of the North (1969, for small orchestra), Rankin Inlet (1978, for piano duo), and Eskimo Melodies (1980, for piano). Adaskin wrote that he hoped his music would "someday be recognized for its Canadian flavor," and much of his programmatic oeuvre dedicates itself to regional and national topics (Canadian Music Centre, Musicanada, 9). His chamber opera based on a Metis fur trader, Grant, Warden of the Plains (1967), was commissioned for Canada’s centenary. The Adaskins, including Murray’s brothers John (1908–1964) and Harry (1901–1994), were significant influences on the cultivation of art music in Canada during the postwar period.

Furniture Music

This chapter explores the furniture music of French composer Erik Satie (1866–1925). Satie's pieces of furniture music are each fundamentally based on a short musical fragment, to be repeated ad lib (at one's pleasure). As such, they are intrinsically monotonous and can retain the attention of the active listener for only a short span before boredom inevitably sets in. Vexations (1893), for instance, is a short piece consisting of four repetitive phrases to be repeated 840 times. Strictly speaking, three sets of furniture music by Satie exist. The first set, from 1917, is composed for flute, clarinet, and strings, plus a trumpet for the first piece. The second set, from 1920 and labeled Sons industriels [Industrial sounds], was performed at the Galerie Barbazanges. The last piece of furniture music for small orchestra from 1923, was commissioned by Mrs. Eugè ne Meyer Jr. of Washington, D.C. Tenture de cabinet préfectoral (approximately: Upholstery for a Governor's Office) was delivered by Satie to furnish the library of her residence.

Whose Voices? The Fate of Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros

Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros for female voices and small orchestra was performed for the first and only time at the Holland Festival in 1970. A setting of texts by female prisoners and factory workers, it marks a sharp stylistic departure from Nono's political music of the 1960s by virtue of its audible quotations of revolutionary songs, its readily intelligible text setting, and especially its retention of the diatonic structure of the song on which the piece is based, the communist “Internationale.” Nono's decision, following the premiere, to withdraw the work from his catalogue suggests that he came to regard it as transgressing an important boundary in his engagement with “current reality.” I examine the work and its withdrawal in the context of discourses within the Italian left in the 1960s that accused the intellectuals of the Partito Comunista Italiano of unhelpfully mediating the class struggle. Nono's contentious reading of Antonio Gramsci, offered as justification for his avant-garde compositional style, certainly provided fuel for this critique. But Voci destroying muros suggests receptivity on the part of the composer—albeit only momentary—to achieving a more direct representation of the voices of the dispossessed.

‘When Feeling Becomes Thought’: Britten, Text and Biography 1928–31

Britten set Aschenbach's hymn to his enfranchised soul at the end of his composing life, but a conscious relationship between experience and an art that would record, analyse and confirm its integrity was present from the first and gives a revelatory quality to his voice-and-piano/small orchestra works. The first significant attempt to ‘keep account of the real’ occurs in the Hugo, Verlaine and de la Mare settings of 1928–1931, when home and life outside its sheltering bounds became for the first time polarized and opposed. In June 1928 Britten submitted an end-of-term essay on ‘Animals’ whose subversive tenor shattered his elders' golden opinions and so harshly unlearned his own illusion that the settings that follow stand to those that precede the event as sagesse stands to méconnaissance, consciousness to nescience.