The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks

This chapter is a detailed discussion of the sophisticated network relations at play in Berlin’s klezmer and Yiddish music scene. Drawing on the work of Howard Becker and Mark Granovetter, it lays out the connections that bring different musicians together, including an analysis of important network hubs and significant weak ties that enable creative links across different musical and social territories. The historical context for these networks is also discussed in detail, including the earlier roles of venues, organizations, and personalities in uniting musicians, audiences, and enthusiasts. The second half of the chapter then offers a detailed breakdown of current musical styles, positing four overlapping stylistic (and in some senses social) categories that help the reader to navigate different expressions and groupings of Berlin klezmer: pioneers, modernists, fantasists, and transformers. Each one of the taxonomies is analyzed in terms of musical approach, repertoire, and relation to other groups. These are enriched in each case by a wealth of ethnographic detail, thick descriptions of particular performances (including the author’s own reactions and responses), and informative musical examples and transcriptions. The chapter concludes by placing the city of Berlin’s klezmer musical networks within the wider international scene of which they are a distinct but related part.

Sounding Jewish in Berlin

This book explores in lively detail the music, musical networks, and performance spaces of the contemporary Berlin klezmer and Yiddish music scene. It chronicles an avowedly international group of musicians (Jewish and non-Jewish) who collectively represent an important new transnational voice for this traditional Eastern European Jewish music. Through the words and music of the performers, the author reveals a rich and constantly developing scene that has embedded itself in the contemporary city in creative, diverse, and sometimes confrontational ways. This ongoing transformation of Berlin klezmer is powerful evidence that if traditional music is to remain audible amid the noise of the urban, it must stake its claim as a meaningful part of that noise. By engaging with the city itself, klezmer in Berlin has moved beyond “revival”—revealing how traditional culture can remain relevant within a shifting, overlapping, decidedly modern, urban cosmopolitanism.

From Galilee Villages to the Mountains of Al-Sham: Local and Regional Musical Networks among Palestinian Arab Wedding Musicians in Northern Israel

Based on recent ethnographic work, we explore the ways in which transnational cosmopolitan music crosses, creates, and reinscribes borders as it is performed by Palestinian Arab wedding musicians in northern Israel. While Palestinian nationalism and the hard political borders between Israel and its neighbouring states frame immediate questions of identity and mobility, in describing their musical practices, musicians turn to a complex, interleaved series of geographies that highlight past and contemporary processes of musical flow. On one hand, they foreground the continuing relevance of the historic al-Sham region as an area of shared musical practice, identifying with the jabali (“mountain”) musical style of the elevated region that marks the borderlands between today’s Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. On the other hand, they embed this regional style within a series of micro- and macro-geographies, from detailed knowledge of the subtle differences in tempo and style between neighbouring Galilee villages to connections with the wider Arabic-speaking world via old and new media. While recent research on music in the Middle East has often foregrounded the role of music in constructing and reinforcing national identities, this research illustrates how transnational flows continue to shape the experience and imagination of musical borderlands in the region.

New Musicians and Travelers in Cuba

This chapter focuses on why musicians want to visit Cuba, how social networks help them get there, and how the influx of new visitors impacted US-Cuban musical relations. An analysis of the social network that has brought a group of Minnesota musicians to the Cubadisco Festival in 2013 and the Minnesota Orchestra there in 2015 shows how Obama-era policies spawned and strengthened transnational musical networks. Both US and Cuban musicians drew upon some amount of previously-accumulated social capital or other human resources available to them in order to navigate the complicated bureaucracies that govern travel across the Florida Straits. Through participation in musical exchanges they blurred the lines between pilgrimage, tourism, and purposeful travel.

‘MUCH TO DELIVER IN YOUR HONOUR'S EAR’: ANGELO NOTARI’S WORK IN INTELLIGENCE, 1616–1623

It has long been surmised that the Paduan singer, lutenist and composer Angelo Notari (1566–1663) was employed as a spy after immigrating to England circa 1610. In examining Venetian counterintelligence papers previously neglected by musicologists, I here confirm that Notari was indeed an intelligencer. More specifically, he was a paid informant for the Venetian State Inquisitors between 1616 and 1619 and participated in a contentious international trial concerning the Venetian ambassador to England, Antonio Foscarini. I argue that Notari's work as a musician was inextricable from his identity as an intelligencer and former Venetian citizen and demonstrate that Italian musicians in Jacobean London significantly influenced international diplomatic relations. By identifying intersections between the two highly social practices of music-making and intelligence-gathering, I encourage greater musicological attention to political networks that transmitted music across borders and, conversely, musical networks that transmitted political intelligence. I thus situate seventeenth-century musical transculturation within its broader diplomatic, confessional and economic contexts.

Exploring Temporality in Horacio Vaggione’s Compositional Thought

This article aims to elaborate Horacio Vaggione’s theoretical approach towards electronic music composition and his understanding of the musical structure, and to discuss how some of his key concepts come into presence during the compositional experience of temporality. Following the introduction of object-oriented composition and musical networks, I will discuss the concept of morphology alongside an investigation of how these ideas relate to temporality. In addition to this inquiry, I will briefly explore the possibilities of an ontological discussion on Vaggione’s compositional mindset and how his temporal perspective differs from some of his colleagues.

Practice, performance and the archive: Cases from Indian classical music genres

Given their emphasis on oral pedagogy and improvisatory approaches, Indian classical music genres present a challenge for constructing historically nuanced studies of musical practices, shifts in them over time and their links to broader developments. Much scholarship on Indian classical music tends to maintain loyalties to disciplinary silos such as social and cultural history, cultural studies and ethnomusicology, often sacrificing aspects of the spectrum of musical experiences. The dispersed nature of musical networks has meant that the archive for studying the phenomena of listening to, learning and disseminating music is fragmented, mobile and multi-local, not easy to capture with conventional methodologies of historical reconstruction or even purely ethnographic fieldwork. A central concern that drives the articles in this issue is a focus on exploring musical sound, repertoire and practices as archives. Such a focus raises two kinds of challenges. One is the identification of archives that can capture the ephemerality and immediacy of these musical practices; the other is the question of interpretive methods that can faithfully reflect the aesthetic and affective dimensions of musical practice. The contributors to this Special Issue explore a range of historical records centred on music ‐ notations, compilations, repertoires, biographies, texts, anecdotes, performances, recordings, pedagogic tools ‐ as their primary archives. Drawing upon disciplinary insights from cultural history, ethnomusicology and sound studies, and often in conversation with musicians and listeners, they offer conceptual and methodological lenses for reading such archives productively.

MUSIC THEORY AT WORK: THE ETON CHOIRBOOK, RHYTHMIC PROPORTIONS AND MUSICAL NETWORKS IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

Whilst scholars often rely on a close reading of the score to understand English musical style at the turn of the fifteenth century, a study of the compositional techniques composers were taught provides complementary evidence of how and why specific stylistic traits came to dominate this repertory. This essay examines the relationship between practical and theoretical sources in late medieval England, demonstrating a link between the writings of two Oxford-educated musicians, John Tucke and John Dygon, and the polyphonic repertory of the Eton Choirbook (Eton College Library, MS 178), compiled c. 1500–4. Select case studies from this manuscript suggest that compositional and notational solutions adopted at the turn of the fifteenth century, having to do particularly with metrical proportions, echo music-theoretical concepts elucidated by Tucke and Dygon. These findings impinge upon the current debate concerning the presence of a network between educational institutions in the south-east of England during this period.

Musical and Literary Networks in the Weekly Critical Review, Paris, 1903–1904

Published in 1903 and 1904 the Weekly Critical Review was a typical ‘little magazine’: it was produced on a shoestring with a small readership, with big editorial ambition. Its uniqueness lay in its claim to be a literary tribute to the entente cordiale (and it enjoyed the imprimatur of King Edward VII), but more importantly, it was a bilingual journal, which was rare at the time even for a little magazine. The Weekly Critical Review aimed to produce high-quality criticism and employed at least a dozen high-profile English and French writers and literary critics including Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915), Arthur Symons (1865–1945) and H.G. Wells (1866–1946). It also published articles and musical news by four leading music critics: English critics Alfred Kalisch (1863–1933), Ernest Newman (1868–1959) and John F. Runciman (1866–1916) and the American James Huneker (1857–1921).Why did these critics write for the Weekly Critical Review? What did the articles in the WCR reveal about Anglo-French relations, about the aspirations of the English and French music critics who wrote for it, and about the scholarly style of journalism it published – a style that was also characteristic of many other little magazines? And in what ways were those who wrote for it connected? As a case study, I examine the ways in which Ernest Newman’s literary and musical networks brought him into contact with the journal and examine the style of criticism he sought to promote.