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This year marks a century since the birth of the musicologist and enescologist Viorel Cosma (1923-2017). The purpose of this article is to recall the impact that Viorel Cosma had in musicological research on a national and international level through the thousands of signed articles and through the approximately 100 books published on themes that highlighted Romanian music and musicians. The significant contributions of Viorel Cosma are recognized in particular for 22 volumes dedicated to George Enescu, for 12 biobibliographical lexicons with personalities of Romanian music, for musical criticism signed throughout 40 years at concerts as well 60 years at opera performances. Viorel Cosma remains in the history of Romanian musical culture as an emblematic personality who successfully combined the role of musicologist, teacher, enescologist, lexicographer and music critic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the discussions, disputes and tensions evident in the commentaries and reviews of Polish music critics during the Third International Chopin Piano Competition (1937). The author's aim is to trace in particular how nationality issues and anti- Semitic ideology affected the reception of the Competition. The article quotes extensively from source texts from the Polish press to illustrate attitudes towards the Competition at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early 1920, a performance of Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony sponsored by the Berlin Volksbühne (People's Theatre) set off a dialogue of remarkable vehemence and duration in the musical press. Writing as spectators of what they imagined to be a working-class audience, professional music critics framed the event as a musical performance that itself was a carefully staged piece of political theatre. Their accounts detail and debate the use of casting, symbols, and rituals to enact a 'leftist' agenda in which Schoenberg's music was not the subversive project of a radical few, but a legitimate exemplar of 'art for the people'—the motto of the Volksbühne. By engaging with the recent 'performative turn' in studies of the Weimar Republic, this article presents a rich microhistory of this experimental concert and its afterlife in the press, revealing vital connections to broader practices of political performativity in Weimar democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I examine Rosalía's Motomami (2022) as a confessional text in which the artist speaks openly about her feelings and reflects on being a celebrity and her relationship with audiences. Music critics immediately noted that it departs from the formula of her previous flamenco-based albums and praised its experimentation and combination of multiple genres. The symbol of the butterfly that appears on the album cover, in the lyrics of the first track ("Saoko"), and on Rosalía's dental grills represents this transformation. But perhaps the biggest change has to do with the intimate tone of the entire album, as Rosalía confesses her struggles, fears, and desires. As Foucault shows in the History of Sexuality , confession has been a central ritual in the discursive production of truth in Western societies. Prominent celebrity studies scholars such as Sean Redmond have noted that the confessional address has become pervasive in contemporary celebrity culture, since it is almost mandatory as a promotional strategy to brand the celebrity persona and do damage control in the case of waning stars. Rosalía's confession is striking because it is played out not only in the lyrics of Motomami but also through the musical features. Most songs have a minimalist composition, with few instrumentals that are filtered and devoid of high frequencies to allow for Rosalía's vocal delivery to stand out. And it is often a bare voice that appears in contrast to aggressive drums to convey the hostile environment Rosalía has faced in the last few years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lullaby "The Meadow Song" in Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games trilogy provides a narrative fulcrum and plays a vital role in reinforcing these novels' thematic concern. However, extant criticism has not given due attention to its utopian function. Drawing upon Ernest Bloch's philosophy of music and other critics' theories on green utopia, this article intends to argue that the lullaby fulfills the utopian function of fueling Katniss's and other rebels' utopian imagination to fight for a better world of justice, equality, and freedom. It also posits that the green utopian community inspired by the lullaby in the last book of the trilogy functions not as an escapist pursuit, but as a micropolitical alternative in an era of global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Estonian music critics and journalists present their selves on social media. Based on in-depth interviews and observations of their social media activities, it proposes a typology of overlapping positions that music critics can adopt on Facebook: the converged promoter, the calculating professional, and the autonomous critic. These positions illustrate how musical authority is disclosed or concealed in specific social media situations and highlight the social complexities involved in music criticism in small societies such as Estonia. The findings suggest that the intimate social environment and the blurring of personal and professional spheres on Facebook favor the expression of standardized positive reactions and promotional content while downplaying autonomous critical judgments in music discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Soviet regime, which returned to Estonia in the autumn of 1944, launched an extensive process of Sovietisation that affected all spheres of life in society. Jazz music also fell out of favour. An antijazz campaign was launched in the Estonian SSR during September and October 1946 in the press, where articles penned by the music critic Serafim Milovski, who was exceedingly loyal to the regime, set the tone. Yet the attacks on jazz were not limited to the press alone. This article shows that against the background of the public 'discussion' that took place in the press, the question of jazz - how to Sovietise jazz? - also appeared on the agenda at the level of the power elite of the Estonian SSR. A letter dated 28 September 1946 from Johannes Semper, the head of the Estonian SSR Arts Administration, to Nikolai Karotamm, the leader of the Estonian Communist Party, confirms this. The letter outlines the power elite's shared understanding with regard to jazz music, which influenced the Soviet regime's subsequent steps in guiding this sphere of activity towards a Soviet path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the ideas of Andrzej Chłopecki (1950-2012), an outstanding Polish music critic and musicologist who specialised in contemporary music, on the subject of twentieth-century music and the ways in which he presented it to nonprofes sional readers in the pages of the Polish press. The author also discusses models of musical historiography relating to the twentieth century, demonstrating the enormous challenge posed by attempts to describe the history of the music of that century. She recapitulates the specific features of Chłopecki’s writing style and the impact of Chłopecki’s wide-ranging activities as promoter of new music in Polish musical culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daniel McNeil has provided a detailed, expansive, and inspirational study of Black cultural critics Armond White (an American film and music critic) and Paul Gilroy (a British cultural critic). To summarize, McNeil describes the work of Gilroy and White as "educational without being sermonising", and this compliment can also be extended to his work. [Extracted from the article]

As Shaw's authorized biographer Archibald Henderson put it in the second of three biographies: "While Shaw may have a dozen labels—art critic, music critic, drama critic, novelist, dramatist, rationalist, Socialist, publicist, harlequin, sage, statesman, prophet—he has only one profession: journalism." 1 Especially remembered now for his achievements as playwright, whether in the vanguard of the New Drama at the end of the nineteenth century or as the established dramatist of world fame throughout the first half of the twentieth, Shaw worked first and last as a journalist in a working life stretching seventy-five years. Dan H. Laurence devoted nearly three hundred pages of the second volume of Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography (1983) itemizing Shaw's contributions to newspapers and periodicals between 1875 and 1950, amounting to almost four thousand entries. 2 For fourteen of those years, from 1885 to 1898, he led the career of a full-time journalist, mostly as a critic of the fine arts, but criticism was by no means the whole story of Bernard Shaw's fourteen-year career as a full-time journalist sketched out in what follows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boris Asafiev, pen name Igor Glebov, was a Russian musicologist, composer, music critic, pedagogue, public figure, publicist; author of works devoted to the music of Igor Stravinsky. The article examines A Book about Stravinsky (1929), one of the earliest monographs on the composer in any language and the first one in Russian. It is characterized as an outstanding musicological study of Stravinsky’s works that had appeared by that time, that is, from the early period to the works completed in 1927 (Oedipus rex, Apollon musagète and The Fairy’s Kiss). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research suggests that exceptional speed is a salient feature in virtuoso performance. However, this claim has not yet been tested by empirical studies. This article sets out to investigate in what ways contemporary piano virtuosos play fast in their performances and how they manifest the concept of virtuosity through tempo. It achieves these goals by analyzing a set of recordings of Chopin’s First Ballade and Liszt’s Sonata with a view to examining the tendency of basic tempo in the performances of two pianists who are most often considered as virtuosos of our time by music critics of English-speaking countries – Kissin and Lisitsa. The results show that they do not always play faster than other selected pianists do. Rather, they tend to play with extreme tempo at the sectional level – playing exceptionally fast in fast sections and exceptionally slow in slow ones. Their performances create dramatic contrast in expression between fast and slow sections, manifesting the concept of virtuosity in both the broader sense – dazzling the audience through broadened expressive power – as well as the narrower sense – displaying of exceptional technical skills through speed, agility and accuracy. The findings provide new, albeit preliminary, insight into the performance practice of modern piano virtuosos and how performers may manifest the concept of virtuosity in their performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses articles about music published by the Hungarian novelist Géza Csáth in the Bački vesnik (Bácskai Hírlap), the daily newspaper of the city of Subotica in which he began his publishing career. In the period from 1903 to 1911, Csáth published twenty-five texts about music in this newspaper. Their main characteristic is collage, while in terms of content, they are dominated by the musical critiques of the concerts he attended, interwoven with his deeper, aesthetic reflections on music and performers. The analysis of these texts shows that Csáth was especially committed to: 1) strengthening the national tradition in Hungarian art music in relation to German/Austrian, 2) the development of musical life in Subotica. Advocacy for the national tradition was common at the beginning of the 20th century in Hungary. Commenting the repertoires of the concerts he attended, Csáth also insists on the use of elements of Hungarian folk music in the opuses of Hungarian composers, as well as on their independence from German art music. The paper discusses Csáth's comments on compositions by Pongrác Kacsóh and Imre Kálmán, who correctly use elements of Hungarian folk music in their work, as well as pieces by Jozsef Fekete and László Toldi Jr., which, in Csáth's opinion, are examples of composing under the influence of German music tradition and particularly Richard Wagner. Csáth's article about the concert performance of Béla Bartók's Scherzo is also analyzed, and his comments are compared with the comments of other Hungarian music critics who also reported on the performance of this piece. Although their opinions are basically in agreement, Csáth is the only one who noticed the modern character of this work by Bartók. Csáth also published articles about the musical life in Budapest and Subotica in Bački vesnik. Comparing the general situation and the level of development of music culture in both cities, he disappointedly states the backwardness of Subotica and demands from the city authorities an urgent reform of the city orchestra, which would be capable of performing more demanding works of art music. According to Csáth, only in that way would the necessary conditions be created for the further development of musical life in Subotica, which would also be the basis for the improvement of the entire cultural life of the city. His writings on music are important documents about the time in which he lived, because they testify to the musical and cultural practices pursued by educated citizens of the cultural periphery, such as Subotica at the beginning of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theories of Boris Asafiev, including musical process, symphonism, and into-natsiya, proved to be hugely influential in the Soviet Union and beyond. While Asafiev’s ideas were widely adopted by theorists and audiences alike, they were also appropriated by a generation of music critics. As composers struggled to come to terms with what might constitute socialist-realist music, critics built a discourse of projecting meaning onto works via Asafiev’s theories. At the same time, multiple theorists developed and expanded his ideas. The picture that emerges is of a multitude of applications and responses to a multivalent body of work that became a vital part of musical discourse in the latter half of the Soviet Union. In this article, I survey the main theories from Boris Asafiev’s writings on music, and their significance after his death. I begin by defining key terms such as symphonism, musical process, and especially intonatsiya. I then discuss the 1948 Zhdanovshchina and Asafiev’s involvement, and the less well-known 1949 discus-sions on Musicology. For the remainder of the article, I provide examples of key studies from Soviet music theorists using Asafiev’s terms to illustrate how their usage expanded and, in some cases, moved away from Asafiev’s myriad intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the critical reception of the Russian composer Alexei Stanchinsky (1888–1914). It focuses on the critical reviews published in Rus-sian newspapers and musical periodicals during Stanchinsky’s lifetime. Its find-ings are a result of original archival research conducted in Moscow in 2019. This study shows that Stanchinsky’s work received a more mixed reception during his lifetime than previously claimed. As such, it provides a more nuanced insight into Stanchinsky’s reception, as well as the views and prejudices of early 20th century Russian music critics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, a new family of free-reed keyboard instruments – including accordions, harmoniums, and parlour organs – became hugely popular throughout Europe. Although these instruments relied on a novel acoustical technology borrowed from an ancient Chinese mouth organ known in the West since the seventeenth century, instrument makers and music critics alike consistently described the sounds they produced using ideas native to a Romantic tradition of affective discourse around windblown strings and spiritual transcendence. This essay traces the European reception of free reeds and interrogates the conditions under which keyboard instruments based on a Chinese technology came to be heard as embodying the properties of a very different instrument: the Aeolian harp. Although various agendas collaborated in obscuring the East Asian origins of the free-reed technology, it seems highly probable that changing political and racial contexts – most notably around 1830 – directly affected the ways in which the reeds were both heard and understood. Studying the appropriation of free reeds by the West as well as the technology's postcolonial afterlives, I argue, can help us better understand the conditions under which sound objects are assimilated or rejected in changing cultural settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thematic catalogue of Franz Liszt's works, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1855 (and in a revised and enlarged edition in 1877), sheds light on Liszt's artistic development after 1848, when he gave up his career as a virtuoso and settled in Weimar. Drawing on a number of previously unpublished or unexamined letters and documents, the article illustrates how this project—probably started on Liszt's own initiative—offered the composer a means to select, order, and authorize the corpus of his works in print. At the same time it provided him with the opportunity to modify his authorial image and strengthen his profile as a 'serious' composer. The correspondence between Liszt and the publisher as well as other manuscript sources reveal the different strategies which allowed him to reposition himself in the music world and—as best illustrated by the later edition—to expand his profile as a composer even further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses reviews on Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder: The Met "At Home" Gala, review by Danielle Ward-Griffin, A "Fantasia" Goes Digital: Heartbeat Opera's Lady M Virtual Soire´e, review by Melanie Gudesblatt, A Visceral Circus Experience: Death Camps in the Time of Coronavirus, review by Peter Ho¨yng and Review Colloquy: 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, Live stream from the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich.

The present paper aims to reveal some of the features which characterize the Mélodies of the French composer Reynaldo Hahn. Although his work comprises several genres, instrumental and vocal alike, these refined and sensitive vocal miniatures are most often associated with Hahn's name. Composer, conductor and music critic, himself a singer, the fascinating personality and intelligence of the composer is reflected in his works. His Mélodies mirror Hahn's preoccupation regarding the relationship between poetry and music, between the spoken and the sung words. In the master's opinion, music should emphasize the deep, hidden meanings beyond the words, thus in his vocal miniatures he strives for a truthful evocation of that which remains unspeakable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ways in which biographers mythologize their subjects' lives (and the way they mythologize their own lives) have long been a topic of research in life-writing. Even though several musicologists have identified mythologizing "motifs," the mythologizing function of "death" and "resurrection" remains under-theorized in relation to musical biography. Such motifs appear in biographies of Berlioz and Liszt written during their lifetimes, beginning with the earliest biographies of the composers, which were written by a friend, the music critic Joseph d'Ortigue. The meanings of these episodes changed when they appeared in auto/biographies written towards the end of their lives: Berlioz's Mémoires and Lina Ramann's Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch (the first "official" biography of Liszt, written partly under his guidance). In both of d'Ortigue's biographical sketches, "resurrection" is associated with the broader social regeneration taking place in Paris in the wake of the July 1830 Revolution, thereby magnifying the composers' importance. The ability to understand and conquer death is also positioned as an integral part of the composers' apprenticeships, further inflating and mythologizing their status as artists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pavle Stefanović (1901–1985) is one of the most prominent Serbian music critics and essayists. He created extensive musicographic work, largely scattered in periodicals. A philosopher by education, he had an excellent knowledge of music and its history. His style was marked by eloquence, associativity and plasticity of expression. Between 1938 and 1940 he published eighteen music reviews in The Music Herald, the longest-running Belgrade music magazine in the interwar period (1928–1941, with interruption from 1934 to 1938). Stefanović wrote about concerts, opera and ballet performances in Belgrade, performances by local and eminent foreign artists. His reviews include Magda Tagliaferro, Nathan Milstein, Jacques Thibaud, Enrico Mainardi, Bronisław Huberman, Alexander Uninsky, Alexaner Borovsky, Ignaz Friedman, Nikita Magaloff and many other eminent musicians. This study is devoted to the analysis of the Stefanović’s procedure. Pavle Stefanović was an anti-fascist and leftist. He believed that the task of a music critic was not merely to analyze and evaluate musical works and musical interpretations. He argued that the critic should engage in important social issues that concerned music and music life. That is why he wrote articles on the occasion of German artists visiting Belgrade, about the persecution of musicians of Jewish descent and the cultural situation in the Third Reich. On the other hand, Stefanović was an aesthetic hedonist who expressed a great sense of the beauty of musical works. That duality – a socially engaged intellectual and a subtle „enjoyer” of the art – remained undisturbed. In these articles he did not go into a deterministic interpretation of the structure of musical composition and the history of music. And he did not accept the larpurlartistic views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text sheds light on a previously little known piece written in 1935 by the Jewish-Serbian poet and literary and music critic Stanislav Vinaver, from the perspective of the much more famous 'artwork essay' by Walter Benjamin, likewise from 1935, as well as some of Vinaver's many writings on music. The purpose is to offer an interpretation of Vinaver's views on the mechanical reproduction of music, seemingly close to Benjamin's views on technological reproducibility in the visual arts and its effects but ultimately drawing very different conclusions. The reasons for this may be found in Vinaver's passionate advocacy of modernism in Yugoslav literature and music alike and a sort of nostalgic, metaphysical reverence for music, reminiscent of its apotheosis in early German Romanticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Graf and Julius Korngold legitimated modernism in music. These two Viennese music critics redefined the avant‐garde music of Strauss, Mahler, Schoenberg, and others by incorporating literary concepts of "die Moderne" into the analysis of musical form. Not only did Graf and Korngold take the concept of modernity as a synonym for "avant‐garde" seriously in order to refer to an era of rapid change, energetic movement, and technophilia, but they clarified how avant‐garde music expressed these qualities at the level of musical language, i.e., form. As "critical formalists," Graf and Korngold pioneered both twentieth‐century terminology for music and analytical methods that anticipated Adorno. This article reassesses the origins of musical modernism in Vienna by focusing on critics and their ambivalence toward "die Moderne," rather than on composers and a crisis of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]