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The “doctrine of affections” is a legendary creature created by early-20th-century German musicologists: its head is made of prescriptive treatises and its body of descriptive compositions. The term has however entered scholarly parlance and is commonly used to refer to a cluster of theorizations and compositional strategies that shared a common aim: emphasizing the affective dimension of music in order to move the listener. The “doctrine of affections” derives its name from the German term Affektenlehre and it lived its golden age in the Baroque era (see the Oxford Bibliographies article on Baroque Music and its section “Music-Theoretical Issues”). It merges a renewed humanistic interest in the ars rhetorica, ensued to the rediscovery of texts such as Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria during the 15th century, with an interest in the mechanics of the passions, fostered by Descartes’ Passions de l’âme (1649). The power of music to raise or soothe the passions had already been discussed by philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle (the latter’s theory of catharsis proving especially successful during the Renaissance), and in some sense “doctrines of affections” have often accompanied the history of thinking about music and its effects. However the “doctrine of affections” stricto sensu is tied to the revival of doctrines of musical ethos by the humanists, in combination with medical elements derived from galenic temperament theory and with the idea of musica humana derived from Boethius (Ficino’s theories being a notable example of this combination). Baroque doctrines of affections, while deriving some themes—such as the link between modes and affects—from these former traditions, modified their gravity center. From a Renaissance medical model interested in the bodily transformations induced by music, the focus shifts to a rhetorical model interested in producing determinate effects on the listeners in the orator’s mode. During the 16th and 17th centuries, from the philosophical upsurge of interest in passions themselves and in their communicability and from the coeval transformations in musical compositional techniques, a renovated rhetorical discourse on affective music and its relation to the poetical texts was drafted. Drawing on the speculations of authors like Descartes, Mersenne, and Kircher, 18th-century theorists tried to single out the affective power of modes and figures, albeit without creating universal theories. These musico-rhetorical theories dawned when a new way of addressing the world of the passions and affections was devised later in the 18th century.
Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia (b. 22 June 1921–d. 13 March 2019) from Ghana was the preeminent scholar of African musics, whose field research in the 1940s in varied ways formed the foundation of music scholarship in Africa and predated ethnomusicology as an academic discipline in the United States. A prolific writer, music educator, and composer, his publications on key topics in African musicology are pivotal to the transdisciplinary field of African studies. Born and raised in Asante Mampong, Nketia was tutored in two worlds of knowledge systems: his traditional musical environment generated and sustained a lifelong interest in indigenous systems, and his European-based formal education provided the space for scholarship at home and around the world. At the Presbyterian Training College at Akropong-Akwapem, he was introduced to the elements of European music by Robert Danso and Ephraim Amu. The latter’s choral and instrumental music in the African idiom made a lasting impression on Nketia as he combined oral compositional conventions in traditional music with compositional models in European classical music in his own written compositions. From 1944 to 1949, Nketia studied modern linguistics in SOAS at the University of London. His mentor was John Firth, who spearheaded the famous London school of linguistics. He also enrolled at the Trinity College of Music and Birkbeck College to study Western music, English, and history. The result of his studies in linguistics and history are the publications of classic texts cited in this bibliography. From 1952 to 1979, Nketia held positions at the University of Ghana including a research fellow in sociology, the founding director of the School of Performing Arts, and the first African director of the Institute of African Studies; and together with Mawere Opoku, he established the Ghana Dance Ensemble. This was a time that he embarked on extensive field research and documentation of music traditions all over Ghana. His students and the school provided creative outlets for his scholarly publications as he trained generations of Ghanaians. In 1958, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship enabled Nketia to study composition and musicology at Juilliard and Columbia with the likes of Henry Cowell, and he came out convinced that his compositions should reflect his African identity. Further, he interacted with Curt Sachs, Melville Herskovits, Alan Merriam, and Mantle Hood, which placed Nketia at the center of intellectual debates in the formative years of ethnomusicology. From 1979 to 1983, Nketia was appointed to the faculty of the Institute of Ethnomusicology at UCLA; and from 1983 to 1991, to the Mellon Chair at the University of Pittsburgh, where he trained generations of Americans and Africans. Nketia returned to Ghana and founded the International Center for African Music and Dance (1992–2010) and also served as the first chancellor of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology (2006–2016). Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia died in Accra and was honored with a state burial on 4 May 2019 by the Government of Ghana.
An instrument with remarkable stylistic range and timbral affordances, the violoncello (referred to in this Bibliography by its common English and German abbreviation, “cello”) is a bowed lute that is fretless, has four strings usually tuned in fifths (C-G-d-a), and is played between the legs. As the lowest member of the violin family, the cello serves a bass function in many standard ensembles, including string quartets and piano trios. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the instrument was a cornerstone of many continuo sections, and treatises attest that accompanimental playing was a foundational skill for any aspiring cellist. In 19th- and 20th-century orchestral writing, it filled a variety of roles, switching between bass and middle lines, punctuated by moments of melodic prominence. The cello is also prized as a solo instrument, due in part to its middle and upper registers, which are celebrated for their sweet tone and emotional immediacy. Attempts to establish the origins of the cello are complicated by the highly regional terminology used to describe a number of similar bass bowed lutes that proliferated throughout the late 16th and 17th centuries. The first use of the term “violoncello” was by Giulio Cesare Arresti in a publication from 1665, and by the beginning of the 18th century, the term was in frequent use. By the mid-18th century, the cello had become the dominant instrument of its kind and range throughout most of Europe. It found earliest success in Italian- and German-speaking lands, but was slower to infiltrate France, where there was competition from the basse de viole through the 18th century. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the cello was frequently employed as a solo instrument in concerti and sonatas, while still functioning as a bass instrument in chamber and orchestral ensembles. Research on its function outside the Western classical tradition is quite scarce and deserves further development; however, the cello has found a growing place in many styles, including jazz, popular, and non-Western musical traditions.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, the troubadours in Occitania and the trouvères in northern France composed songs with texts in the vernacular and monophonic melodies. For the troubadours, the vernacular was Old Occitan; for their northern counterparts, Old French. This difference in idiom is sometimes held to mark a distinction between two separate but analogous traditions of medieval song. The medieval practices of compiling multilingual lyric anthologies and of borrowing melodies seem instead to affirm the contiguity of song culture across different languages. The term “lyric” during this period typically designates a text set to melody, but not all manuscripts of troubadour and trouvère lyric preserve song melodies. Music survives for nearly half of the trouvère repertory (about three thousand songs) but only about 10 percent of the twenty-six hundred extant troubadour songs. The compositional period for troubadours and trouvères is conventionally defined rather rigidly as 1100–1300, and the songs themselves as strophic and monophonic. However, the troubadours and trouvères also composed in non-strophic genres (lais and descorts), and the trouvères composed in non-musical lyric genres (congés, dits) as well as in polyphonic forms. Adam de la Halle and Jehan de Lescurel, for example, produced small but significant collections of single-text polyphonic pieces. Of course, the composition of French and Occitan song also continued beyond 1300, albeit in different social and cultural contexts, by which point the long history of its study and reception had already begun. Some of the most important reference works, such as the Pillet-Carstens Bibliographie, date from the early 20th century and come from France and Germany, while Anglophone publications on troubadour and trouvère music only began to emerge in the second half of the 20th century. Modern scholars continually renew this material by bringing it into conversation with critical theory (Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut, cited under General Studies), feminist theory (Songs of the Women Trouvères, cited under Anthologies), and social history (The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100–1300, cited under Musical, Literary, Social, and Political Studies; The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100-c.1300 and Parler d’amour au puy d’Arras: Lyrique en jeu, both cited under Regional Studies). The vibrancy in troubadour and trouvère scholarship also comes from interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange among musicologists, historians, paleographers, and literary scholars. Despite their shared primary sources, the fields of musicology and of literary studies have approached troubadour and trouvère material differently, and with different emphases. In part, these differences can be ascribed to the difficulty of defining a corpus of study, which does not always overlap for the two fields. The organization of this article echoes some of these tensions between older but fundamental reference works and newer directions of inquiry, and the sometimes separate, sometimes unified, treatment of troubadour and trouvère song.
For centuries, street musicians, or buskers, have been plying their trade the world over. However, the study of street music and musicians is an emerging field of research. It is richly interdisciplinary and reaches into many fields, including anthropology, art history, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, human geography, law and legal studies, marketing, and musicology, as well as tourism and urban studies. The topics on which scholars write largely include noise and regulation, protest, aesthetics of space, and studies of street musicians in particular cities and countries on every continent. The genres of music include street cries and brass bands, along with studies of solo instruments such as the harp, violin, voice, and accordion. The literature on street music can be categorized into three overlapping areas: historical, ethnographical, and philosophical and social. Historical studies are concentrated on street cries and street singing. Ethnographical studies are evident in a range of historical studies but also in contemporary accounts of artists from New York to Moscow and Rio de Janeiro to Melbourne. Encounters with buskers provide not only insight into the reasons they perform, but also the repertory they play and the influence of audiences and technology on their performance. Where and how musicians perform also tell us about the precarious place street musicians occupy in the cultural economies of place, especially in relation to the use of digital culture and e-commerce as a means of making money and publicity. Philosophical and social inquiry asks questions about the nature of the space street music occupies; the ways in which it is and owned, shared, or a contested space; and the psychology of creativity in the moment of performance for both musician and audience. At the heart of much of the literature on street music is the way street sound and music has been captured over the centuries. Early modern studies rely on texts—and textual analyses—to speculate on the style or mode of singing that street criers and performers used to disseminate their messages or to perform. Studies from the late 18th century rely on artworks such as woodblocks, engravings, etchings, and oil paintings to depict the sound. In the 19th century, musical transcriptions begin to appear as a way to approximate the sound of the street (usually sounds created by solo performers), but today transcription is less of a requirement. Video-recording and other forms of digital imaging are capturing the sounds and music of street musicians and their sometimes international careers. Some studies adopt theoretical approaches drawing on the work of such writers as Michel de Certeau, Erving Goffman, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Attali, and Richard Florida.
Joaquín Rodrigo y Vidre (b. 1901–d. 1999) was born in Sagunto, in the province of Valencia, Spain, on 22 November 1901, the feast day of St. Cecilia, patron saint of music. Rodrigo was a productive composer for over six decades, and his roughly two hundred works include masterpieces for orchestra, chamber ensemble, chorus, solo voice, piano, and especially guitar, an instrument on which he was not proficient but the one with which his legacy is inextricably connected. Indeed, by far and away his most famous work is the Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra, composed in 1938–1939 and premiered in 1940. The middle movement’s main theme has provided inspiration for a whole assortment of arrangements by jazz artists such as Miles Davis and Chick Corea, and it has often been quoted in music for film and television. The unfortunate consequence of this melody’s viral popularity, however, is that it has tended to put much of his other music in the shade. Rodrigo’s achievement is remarkable because he lost his eyesight at age three as a result of diphtheria. Fortunately, the family moved to the city of Valencia in 1906, where advanced institutions for educating the deaf and blind were located. He received excellent training in piano, violin, and composition, as well as in regular academic subjects. Rodrigo became proficient in reading Braille notation for both words and music. He would eventually use a machine to type up his musical ideas in Braille, which he would then dictate to an assistant to write out in conventional notation. The music would thereafter be played at the piano so that he could hear it and make any necessary changes. In 1927 he moved to Paris to continue his studies in composition with Paul Dukas, at the École Normale de Musique. It was during his years in Paris that he met and married Victoria Kamhi, a Sephardic Jewess from Istanbul who was studying piano there. Composer and wife returned to Spain for good in 1939, settling in Madrid after the end of the Spanish Civil War and on the eve of World War II. The successful premiere of the Concierto de Aranjuez cemented his reputation as a leading figure in Spanish music. He also became a music critic for Radio Nacional, the newspaper Pueblo, and he assumed administrative responsibilities for ONCE, the national organization for the blind. Rodrigo’s international reputation began to grow steadily during the 1950s, and he would be the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, at home and abroad. He passed away at the age of ninety-seven, two years after Victoria. His legacy is preserved and promoted by the Fundación Victoria y Joaquín Rodrigo in Madrid (see online), which maintains his apartment as both a museum and a research archive. It is headed by the composer’s daughter, Cecilia (b. 1941).
An astute dissident activist, political force, and iconoclast, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (b. 1938–d. 1997), popularly called Fela, was a legendary and innovative composer, arranger, bandleader, Pan-Africanist, and the father of the genre known as Afrobeat. He used his music as a weapon against injustice and for derision and ridicule of politicians and politics. He was born Olúfelá Olúségun Olúdòtun Ransome-Kuti, on 15 October 1938, in Abeokuta, the present-day capital of Ogun State in Nigeria (then a British colony), into an upper-middle-class family. He later replaced Ransome-Kuti with Anikulapo-Kuti, Aníkúlápó meaning “the one who holds death in their pouch.” His father, Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, was an Anglican clergyman and school principal, and his mother, Chief Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (FRK) was a nationalist feminist. She was Fela’s primary ideological influence. Fela’s musical seeds were sown by his father, who was an accomplished composer. Fela furthered his artistic exploration with the Cool Cats, Victor Olaiya’s highlife band. He later studied music at the Trinity College of Music, London, in 1958, where his primary instrument was the trumpet. He formed a highlife and jazz fusion band, Highlife Rakers (later Koola Lobitos). Upon completing his studies, he moved to Nigeria in 1963, then a recently independent country, to work as a radio producer for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. Fela embarked on new musical explorations and experiments with Koola Lobitos and later named his music Afrobeat. In 1969, Fela traveled to the United States with his band, where they spent ten months in Los Angeles, and Fela was exposed to the works and philosophy of black leaders like Malcolm X. During this time, his mother’s influence blossomed, and his Pan-African ideology began to manifest. Upon returning to Nigeria, his emerging political consciousness drew inspiration from racial discrimination in the United States and colonial oppression in Africa. His lyrical themes shifted to addressing social issues. Name changes further marked his promising Pan-African consciousness. He rechristened his band Fela Ransome-Kuti and Nigeria 70, and later to Fela Ransome-Kuti and Afrika ’70, and Egypt ’80. Fela grew into a full-blown dissident and antagonist, confronting and lambasting the Nigerian military government and politicians. With over two hundred court appearances, he lived on the edge and suffered numerous incarcerations and physical assaults. His Pan-African messages were aimed at liberating Africans from colonial shackles. His music became a voice for the unheard and disenfranchised, and the defender of African society.
Bruckner was born in Ansfelden (rural Upper Austria) in 1824 and was originally trained as a schoolmaster. He only left this career path in his early thirties when he assumed the organist position at the Linz cathedral, his first full-time employment as a musician. It was also in Linz that he completed six years of training in harmony and counterpoint with Simon Sechter (1855–1861) as well as lessons in form and orchestration with Otto Kitzler (1861–1863) after which he commenced work on his first symphony in 1865. Bruckner’s three large masses also date from his Linz period. Concert tours to France in 1869 and England in 1871 brought Bruckner major successes as organ improvisor. In 1868 Bruckner became professor of counterpoint and thoroughbass as well as professor of organ at the Vienna conservatory. Success as a composer did not follow suit as quickly. His passionate admiration of Wagner—to whom he dedicated his Third Symphony in 1873—rendered Bruckner the target of hostility from the supporters of Brahms in Vienna, especially of music critic Eduard Hanslick. The latter was also instrumental in obstructing Bruckner’s employment at the University of Vienna until 1875, when Bruckner finally became lecturer of harmony and counterpoint at the university. Despite his fame as an organist and music theorist, Bruckner saw himself, above all else, as a symphonic composer and it is the development of the symphony as a genre that occupied most of his compositional interest throughout his career. Accordingly, the multiple versions of Bruckner’s symphonies have long been a main focal point of Bruckner scholarship. These revisions were variously motivated. Earlier works, including the three masses and symphonies 1–5, underwent reworking during Bruckner’s “revision period” (1876–1880), largely as a result of the composer’s evolving notions of phrase and period structure. Later revisions were often the results of performances or were made to prepare the manuscripts for publication. Bruckner’s former students, most notably Franz and Josef Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe, were involved in these revisions, although the extent of this involvement has never been entirely revealed. Starting in the 1920s, scholars began to raise questions about the validity of the revisions made during the preparations of the editions published during the 1880s and 1890s. While some accepted the authenticity of these texts, other influential figures—among them Robert Haas, coeditor of the first Bruckner complete edition—claimed that Bruckner’s students had urged the composer, wearied by rejection in Vienna, into making ill-advised changes or, worse yet, altered his scores without his knowledge and permission. The resulting debate, the Bruckner Streit, involved serious source-critical issues, but eventually devolved on ideological claims more than factual analysis. The process led to the first Bruckner Gesamtausgabe, which published the manuscript versions of Bruckner’s works starting in 1934, first under the editorship of Robert Haas and later of Leopold Nowak. However, these editions are now largely outdated due to the many manuscript sources that have become available since the mid-20th century. Haas’s work has also been criticized in more recent years for rather subjectively mixing sources. Therefore, two new complete editions have recently been started. Another topic that has fascinated Bruckner scholarship for much of the last century is the unfinished finale of the 9th symphony and its possible completion.
Béla Bartók (b. 1881–d. 1945) was one of the most influential musical figures of the 20th century, particularly from outside the historic musical centers of Germany, France, and Italy. Now remembered principally as a composer, he was also an international concert pianist, teacher of piano, and pioneer in folk music research. Bartók was born and educated in the provincial periphery of late-19th-century Hungary; when he was admitted to institutions in both Vienna and Budapest for his advanced education, he made the fateful decision to enroll in Budapest’s Royal Academy of Music. In 1907 he joined its piano faculty, continuing until 1934, when he transferred to a full-time position doing folk music research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He performed his works widely, especially during the interwar period, though after 1934 his performances in Germany ceased, in part due to his refusal to certify his Aryan origins. As Bartók grew uneasy about Hungary’s alliance with the Third Reich, he and his wife left after his mother’s death, landing in New York in 1940. He died there of leukemia in 1945. After modeling his early works on the chromaticism of Richard Strauss combined with 19th-century Hungarian-style motifs, Bartók changed his musical direction after his discovery of the folk songs of isolated peasantry, first by chance in 1904 and then in systematic fieldwork with Zoltán Kodály beginning in 1905. Bartók studied village music of not only Hungarians but also other ethnic groups around East-Central Europe, North Africa, and Turkey. His study of these materials along with the music of earlier composers, particularly Debussy, Liszt, and Beethoven, were his sources for new modes of organization of pitch, rhythm, and form. He also responded in music and words to other modernist musicians of his time; several scholars have investigated the issue of who influenced whom. At the height of his career, he departed radically from tonality and reinterpreted classical forms in some works, while at the same time writing a variety of more accessible and frequently performed character pieces, folk song settings, and pedagogical works. Some of the large-scale works he produced at the end of his life, most notably the Concerto for Orchestra (1943), combined ambition of scale and accessibility in a way that made for great success with the public. However, some postwar modernist critics, who debated the issue of accessibility through a Cold War lens, saw Bartók’s popularity as a sign of selling out to audiences rather than following the “mandate of history.” Bartók scholars have addressed a wide range of topics, from cultural studies of his interactions with other artists in Hungary and abroad, to his folk music research, to close readings of his compositions from biographical, literary, or source-studies perspectives, to a multitude of music-theoretical analyses. This bibliography provides a representative survey of the voluminous Bartók scholarship.
For centuries, variations have garnered the attention of Western composers and amassed popularity among virtuosi and audiences alike. Unfortunately, the reception of this form type within the scholarly community is less enthusiastic, especially in comparison to sonata form, which continues to draw curiosity and inquiry. This is unfortunate, as scholars who analyze variations are faced with fundamental musical questions such as: Where are the borders drawn between same, similar, and different musical material? How does a listener determine whether one passage is a variation of another? How does a composer signal that a piece is finished, and is this signal always convincing? Do musical events need to occur in a particular order to make sense, or can the ordering be changed without serious consequences? Variation form brings these issues to the fore, and the works listed in this article engage them in a variety of ways. Sections are primarily organized chronologically by time period, focusing on stylistic eras, composers, and specific compositions. Of note to readers is the almost exclusive focus on instrumental works and the limited sources addressing music written before the baroque period. There is a notable emphasis on the “canon” and “canonic composers,” especially J. S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Mozart, and Johannes Brahms, as well as structural approaches to analysis (particularly the writings of Heinrich Schenker). These shortcomings and limited perspectives reflect the current state of research on variation form; we encourage new research that will diversify the range of scholarship on this topic in regard to composers, repertoires, and analytical approaches. In particular, hermeneutic/semiotic/narrative approaches to variation form are particularly appealing, and works by underrepresented composers deserve analytical attention and scholarship.
