Handel’s Transformative Compositional Practices

In recent decades singers of Handel’s music have made great strides in recapturing the art of embellishing his music, thus breathing new life into forms such as the da capo aria. Yet Handel’s own “variations”—his development and transformation of musical material in his vocal music, important for understanding his compositional practice with borrowed as well as (presumably) original music—are not yet fully explored or appreciated. Admittedly, scholars have discussed musical procedures such as inserting, deleting, and reordering musical materials, as well as other Baroque combinatorial practices in Handel’s arias, but the musical transformations I discuss here are closer to a specifically Handelian brand of developing variation. To my knowledge, the concept of developing variation has never before been applied to early eighteenth-century music. I explore the relation of developing variation to drama (also rarely done) in two of Handel’s arias, providing a close examination of “Ombre, piante” from the opera Rodelinda and new thoughts about “Lament not thus,” originally intended for the oratorio Belshazzar. Although these arias belong to different genres and different stages of Handel’s career, they both exhibit material that undergoes a kind of progressive variation process that has tangible musical and dramatic ramifications, of interest to opera specialists and performers. Furthermore, both arias have a complicated compositional history; I offer fresh insights into the aesthetic qualities of each version, thereby throwing light on Handel’s possible compositional intentions. This article also discloses for the first time some recurring musical passages shared between “Lament not thus” and other pieces that could influence the listener’s interpretation of certain musico-dramatic gestures.

Music for Martyrs

This article interrogates sacred repertoire produced in late seventeenth-century Salzburg as a reflection of a local Catholic piety that centered on sacrifice, especially the ultimate sacrifice of martyrdom. As an individual principality that was subject to both the Papal court in Rome and the Holy Roman Emperor, Salzburg provides a meaningful case study in the heterogeneous regional post-Tridentine Catholic practices that musicologists and historians alike have only begun to explore. Compositions by Andreas Hofer (1629–84) and Heinrich Biber (1644–1704) present a prime example of sacred music’s ability to manifest a region’s distinct piety. Supported by their patron Prince-Archbishop Maximilian Gandolph von Kuenburg (r. 1668–87), Hofer and Biber left behind musical evidence of this exceptional Catholicism in the feasts they elaborated with substantial concerted compositions as well as the distinct texts they set, which do not align with prescribed liturgies and likely reflect persistent local practices that resonated with the prince-archbishop’s Counter-Reformation agenda. Printed liturgical books and emblems celebrating Maximilian Gandolph further support the claim that throughout the seventeenth century liturgical practice and sacred music in Salzburg maintained a local flavor that concentrated on themes of sacrifice and martyrdom.

On the Foundations of Dahlhaus’s Foundations

In the foreword to his Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (1977), translated into English as Foundations of Music History (1983), Carl Dahlhaus names three reasons for writing the book: the lack of theoretical reflection in his own field; the problem of mediation between methodological maxims and their political implications; and the difficulties he encountered while preparing his history of nineteenth-century music. Each of the three reasons can now be understood more precisely and historically contextualized in light of recently uncovered letters and notes. Dahlhaus’s methodological critiques of political music as conceptually distinct from aesthetically autonomous works—contrary to a popular claim by Anne Shreffler (2003)—were directed mainly at the “Western left.” Moreover, in the 1980s this controversy became intertwined with historiographical questions regarding the concept of “event” that was reinforced in publications by the “Gruppe Poetik und Hermeneutik.” A postscript discusses the English translation of the book and the concept of “structural history” in late Dahlhaus.

Rome after Josquin

The “Roman period” of Josquin des Prez resulted in a small but impressive body of work, and the Missa La sol fa re mi has been received as one of the most substantial and finest members of this corpus. Closer inspection of the transmission of this mass, however, suggests that despite its copying at the Sistine Chapel before 1500, there is reason to situate it instead among the problematic and derivative copies of Josquin’s music made at the papal chapel after his departure. I argue that rather than originating from the composer’s tenure in Rome, the Missa La sol fa re mi entered the papal chapel repertoire as part of an influx of music by composers associated with the French royal court surrounding the Italian campaign of King Charles VIII in 1494–95. Decoupling the Missa La sol fa re mi from Josquin’s tenure at the papal chapel raises new possibilities surrounding his works-chronology, biography, and milieu.

The Musical Ineffable Revisited

Inherited from Romantic metaphysics, the musical ineffable is a contested category; denoting something in musical experience that largely escapes verbal articulation, it also leads to diverse philosophical assessments of its validity as an analytic category. Its contested status, however, can be given clearer, historically embedded contours if it is related to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic register of the Real across historically changing modes of media-technological reproducibility. This connection gives us new insights into the interface between sensuous immediacy, verbal articulation, and sonic media characteristic of the auditory imagination.

Free Jazz and the “New Thing”

Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz was at the center of controversy in early 1960s music journalism. Released in 1961, the album contains a single thirty-seven-minute performance that is abstract and opaque. Its presumed cacophony and lack of order made Free Jazz emblematic of the “new thing,” the moniker journalists used to describe jazz’s emergent avant-garde, and links were drawn between the album’s sound and the supposed anti-traditionalism and radical (racial) politics of its artists and their supporters. This article does three things. It examines prominent reportage surrounding the album and the “new thing,” outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, decentralized musical texture. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple simultaneous subjectivities (i.e., different sonified identities), interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh—woven by the musicians in coordinated action—subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more “freely.”

From Machine to Musical Instrument

Media histories of music often frame technological innovation in the early twentieth century within a general zeal for automated musical reproduction. The engineering efforts of the Aeolian Company and its Pianola counter such narratives by fostering active music-making rather than passive listening. As a pneumatically powered attachment to a piano, the Pianola was initially limited to reproducing strictly mechanical renditions of music from perforated paper rolls. But the invention of the Metrostyle in 1903, a hand lever to achieve tempo-specific effects, significantly refined the musical capacities of the instrument. It allowed for inscribing onto the music rolls authoritative performance instructions that could be enacted by the player. Revisiting the various places that the Metrostyle Pianola inhabited, from the manufacturing site to the concert hall and the bourgeois living room, I illuminate the different sociocultural relationships and musical experiences that it mediates. By relegating certain tasks of conventional piano-playing to the mechanical workings inside the instrument, the Pianola was marketed as facilitating simplified music-making in ever wider parts of society. The Metrostyle annotations served as a pedagogical device for instructing novice players in principles of nuanced and tasteful interpretation. My analysis exposes the reciprocal relationships between the instrument and its human players, from attempts to adapt the physical interface to human physiologies, to the ways in which the instrument, in turn, imposes certain mechanistic affordances on its players.

Prisoners’ Voices

Frederic Rzewski composed Coming Together and Attica in response to the 1971 uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility. The texts for the works draw upon testimonies of two men who participated in the riot: Samuel Melville and Richard X. Clark, respectively. Rzewski condemns the government crackdown on the uprising through representations of both prisoners and prison. In these and other works, the prisoner is a figure of suffering. Both Melville and Clark suffer through efforts to raise a voice about the hardships of incarceration only to have that voice break apart into fragments and silence. Prison emerges as a space of increasing confinement, conveyed by rigorous compositional schemes that tightly link individual sections and close them off in a larger sealed structure. The musical evocation of confinement along with the expression of psychological distress in the texts creates scenes of suffering. Through these scenes, Rzewski brings out the infliction of pain that scholars have viewed as a fundamental aspect of incarceration. The interaction between the critiques of incarceration and the compositional schemes in Coming Together and Attica is an example of how artists at the time (Steve Reich and sculptor Melvin Edwards) drew upon abstract idioms and materials in works that comment on contemporary political developments.

Ballet Fit for a National Theater? Carré, the Critics, and Le Cygne at the Opéra-Comique

When Albert Carré became the director of the Paris Opéra-Comique in 1898, he did so with the goal of rejuvenating French lyric theater. He also took possession of a national institution in a state of flux. The Opéra-Comique had a new hall and a new mandate, and it had recently become the focus of debates in the press about what role the city’s second national lyric theater should play in French culture. Although debates initially revolved around opera, Carré’s plans for renewal included ballet, not seen at the Opéra-Comique for over a century. This article discusses the role ballet played in promoting Carré’s artistic objectives. At first glance the theater’s repertoire appears to be at odds with Carré’s progressive ideals. The Opéra-Comique staged only one innovative ballet, Le Cygne (1899)—a pop-culture-inflected mythological parody by Catulle Mendès, Charles Lecocq, and Madame Mariquita. Carré then turned to staging old-fashioned pantomime-ballets, confining innovative dances to divertissements in operas. The reasons for Carré’s repertoire decisions can, I argue, be found in the reception of Le Cygne. Carré’s initial ballet was highly contested, and critics’ arguments mirrored ongoing press debates about ballet’s value and place in French culture. I contend that Carré’s initial modernist ballet, and his shift to mixing conventional pantomime-ballets with modern opera divertissements in response to the contentious reception of Le Cygne, were part of a calculated attempt to establish the Opéra-Comique as an emblematic French national theater that was simultaneously a museum and a progressive space for modern innovation.

Imitating Africans, Listening for Angels

Church ensembles of Spaniards across the Spanish Empire regularly impersonated African and other non-Castilian characters in the villancicos they performed in the Christmas Matins liturgy. Although some scholars and performers still mistakenly assume that ethnic villancicos preserve authentic Black or Native voices, and others have critiqued them as Spaniards’ racist caricatures, there have been few studies of the actual music or of specific local contexts. This article analyzes Al establo más dichoso (At the happiest stable), an ensaladilla composed by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla for Christmas 1652 at Puebla Cathedral. In this performance his ensemble impersonated an array of characters coming to Christ’s mangers, including Indian farm laborers and African slaves. The composer uses rhythm to differentiate the speech and movement of each group, and at the climax he even has the Angolans and the angels sing together—but in different meters. Based on the first edition of this music, the article interprets this villancico within the social and theological context of colonial Puebla and its new cathedral, consecrated in 1649. I argue that through this music, members of the Spanish elite performed their own vision of a hierarchical and harmonious society. Gutiérrez de Padilla was himself both a priest and a slaveholder, and his music elevates its characters in certain ways while paradoxically also mocking them and reinforcing their lowly status. Building on Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the “three worlds of the text,” the article compares the representations imagined within the musical performance with archival evidence for the social history of the people represented and the composer’s own relationships with them (the world behind the text). Looking to the world projected “in front of” the text, I argue that these caricatured representations both reflected and shaped Spaniards’ attitudes toward their subjects in ways that actively affected the people represented. At the same time, I argue that Spanish representations mirrored practices of impersonation among Native American and African communities, especially the Christmastide Black Kings festivals, pointing to a more complex and contradictory vision of colonial society than what we can see from the slaveholder’s musical fantasy alone.