The Cypriotization of Beethoven or Beethoven’s Cypriotization: The Composer’s Traces Throughout the Foundation of the “Westernized” Cypriot Music Scene

The focus of this paper is the reception of Ludwig van Beethoven’s works at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the establishment of symphony orchestras and other cultural institutions. These works include symphonic and chamber music, performed in the framework of symphonic concerts as presented by the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra and chamber music as presented by chamber music festivals. This paper will shine a light onto the preserved concert programs of the orchestras, as well as other concerts that can be traced in newspapers and other printed magazines, in order to demonstrate how Beethoven’s compositions became part of the concert programming. The rapid but simultaneously abrupt growth of the cultural scene in the twentieth century, was interweaved with what kind of compositions and what composers could be included in concert programs, taking into consideration the restrictions that governed large performances such as performers’ numbers and the diversity of instrumental players, who would support the staging of certain works. The reception of Beethoven’s works is studied in the changing local political, historical, social and cultural context.

The Felix Meritis Concert Programs Database, 1832–1888: From Archival Ephemera to Searchable Performance Data

The Felix Meritis Concert Programs Database 1832–1888 (fmcp Database) provides a full digitisation of the concert programs collection of the most long-standing Dutch concert hall in the nineteenth century: Felix Meritis. Formerly hidden in boxes with archival ephemera, the content of this collection is now unlocked by manually entering the program details into a searchable dataset. The programs give an extremely rich account of a local concert practice, the performed repertoire, and the musicians involved. However, archiving concert programs at item-level presents a challenge: due to inconsistencies in and incompleteness of work descriptions it is often hard to identify and categorize the musical works performed. For the fmcp database, the authors have developed a possible solution to this problem; a strategy for structuring and categorizing concert programming data that aims to include incomplete work descriptions and reflect genre categorizations used in local concert practice. In this paper, the authors will present this categorization method and discuss the attributes and the basic structure of the fmcp database.

Liedbegleitung und künstlerische Identität. Zur Zusammenarbeit Clara Schumanns mit Julius Stockhausen

Clara Schumann’s impact on the history of piano playing and the development of 19th century concert life can hardly be denied. But understanding her pianistic career in terms of the work of a modern soloist covers the fact that she actually spent a large amount of time on stage not alone but performing together with colleagues. Taking a closer look at Clara Schumann’s collaboration with the baritone Julius Stockhausen, this article provides special insight into this field of her professional life: In addition to uncovering the contexts of collective concert programming and its reception it sheds light on the evolution of the Lied accompanist’s artistic identity in general and Clara Schumann’s specific ideal of communicating through musical performance.

Sucker

Today, the performance of film music is a staple of symphony concert programming. In 1943, it was an anomaly. That year, Steiner was invited to conduct the New York Philharmonic for a potential audience of twenty thousand at Lewisohn Stadium. But for Max, the concert proved a humiliating disaster, due to the orchestra’s open hostility toward a “Hollywood” composer, and the addition to the program of 27-year-old Frank Sinatra. More teen idol than respected singer at the time, Sinatra inspired Beatles-like screaming from his fans throughout the concert, upstaging Steiner. A series of personal calamities followed: the death of Max’s beloved father, a health crisis of his own, and seemingly insurmountable debt. Again, music was Steiner’s salvation. The 1944 film Since You Went Away—his last collaboration with Selznick—earned Max a third Oscar. But shortly after its release, Steiner was devastated by news that Louise wanted a divorce.

Effects of applause magnitude and musical style on listeners’ evaluations of choral performances

Applause, an overt expression of approval from audience to performer, is one of the most common forms of audience response to live musical performances. In this study, we examined the effects of applause magnitude (high, low, or no applause) and musical style (motet or spiritual) on listeners’ ratings of choral performances. A secondary area of interest was the degree to which these effects might differ between music majors and non-music majors. University singers ( N = 117) listened to six excerpts recorded by a university choral ensemble and rated the performance quality of each excerpt. Across these recordings, they heard three identical recordings of a motet and three identical recordings of a spiritual with unique applause conditions attached. Listeners’ ratings were influenced by the magnitude of audience applause to a limited degree, but this effect interacted with musical style and presentation order. We observed no differences between the ratings of music and non-music majors, however. Results are interpreted in light of previous research on majority effects, and implications of these results regarding performance evaluation and concert programming are discussed.

Changing Content in Flagship Music Theory Journals, 1979–2014

Since the founding of the Society for Music Theory in 1977, the Anglophone music theory discipline has extensively diversified, now encompassing manifold subfields. A pertinent question arises: how does the music theory discipline balance this diversity with a sense of unity and cohesiveness? An investigation into journal articles—one of the main ways music theory presents itself to the world—can serve as a useful entry point for this question. We develop and analyze a corpus of article abstracts published between 1979 and 2014 from four general-scope flagship periodicals:Journal of Music Theory,Music Theory Spectrum,Music Analysis, andMusic Theory Online.For each of 1063 abstracts analyzed, theoretical topics and repertoire (including composer) are tabulated. Observations are organized according to which topics and repertoires are addressed most frequently, as well as whether correlations between leading topics and repertoires might exist. Extending beyond our initial question regarding diversity and cohesiveness, the corpus data is then used to assess how music theory research relates to trends in concert programming, as well as the repertoire used in textbooks designed for undergraduate theory curricula. Based on the data generated in this study, we find that a balance of diversity and cohesiveness appears to exist in the form of a broad range of research topics engaging with a comparatively small canon of music by only a few composers. This relationship is, however, paradoxical; the small canon belies the diversity of repertoire that currently permeates the discipline.

Building an Empty Frame

Chapter 2 argues that self-conscious pluralism enabled festival advocates to negotiate a secure institutional position during a period of cultural retrenchment that began in Poland in the late 1950s. This approach to concert programming developed behind the scenes, during planning meetings in which Warsaw Autumn organizers selected repertoire, grouped works and composers into stylistic and geopolitical categories, and determined of what the festival should consist. Equally important were the maneuvers that took place in printed discourse, wherein critics and other commentators positioned the Warsaw Autumn as an empty frame—that is, a neutral zone in an otherwise polarized world of new music performance. The chapter contends that these negotiations were necessary because, despite rhetoric to the contrary, few observers thought the Warsaw Autumn was truly objective.

A “League Against Willan”? The Early Years of the Canadian League of Composers, 1951–1960

The founders of the Canadian League of Composers were young modernists who resented the conservative musical climate in Canada epitomized by the traditional British style of Canada's most famous composer, Healey Willan. In their first decade (1951–60), during which their membership grew from eight to more than forty and they presented dozens of concerts of new Canadian music, they struggled to find a balance between two competing goals: championing the cause of all Canadian composers, regardless of style, and promoting modern and avant-garde styles, which had been virtually ignored by the older Canadian musical establishment. This article probes how those tensions played out in two of the league's early activities: membership decisions and concert programming. Although the league did admit composers and feature works representing a wide variety of stylistic influences, its membership and concerts were nonetheless dominated by younger composers interested in modern styles, especially the group of composers in John Weinzweig's circle in Toronto. The group earned a reputation as young radicals because of their modernistic programming choices and a controversial policy that limited membership to composers younger than sixty. Although its members may not have been entirely successful in their efforts at inclusivity, the league's ground-breaking activities in the 1950s did help to establish a place for composition generally and musical modernism in particular in the postwar Canadian cultural landscape.