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The paper deals with the musical work of Ludevít Procházka (1837-1888). It contains both quantitative analyses (e.g. numbers of compositions in individual forms and genres), as well as detailed description of Procházka’s works and their reception, based on the contemporary press. It also focuses on the creative periods of the artist’s life and the factors that influenced his work. It also explores the specific poets whose texts Procházka most often chose to set to music. The work also contains music samples and special attention is paid to the composer’s key compositions (e.g. Procházek’s song Kovářská for singing with piano accompaniment or the composer’s quatrain Naše probuzení). The paper concludes with an assessment of Procházka’s contribution as a composer to the Czech lands and the relevance of his work today [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the challenges faced by women composers in the 19th century, focusing on their limited acceptance in the professional music scene and the stereotypes they encountered. It discusses the perception of women as intellectually inferior and incapable of composing serious, large-scale works. It says despite these obstacles, American women composers emerged and gained recognition, ultimately breaking gender barriers and paving the way for future generations.

This essay explores the reasons for, as well as the technical nature of, the dramatic shifts of compositional style that characterize the work of George Rochberg (1918-2005). There were three periods: an early style, at once atonal and neoclassic; an intensely serialist middle period; and a final period that engaged the music of the 19th century in a neo-romantic manner. Three representative solo piano works are analyzed, the Prelude and Fughetta, Sonata-Fantasia and Carnival Music—and certain unities emerge: Rochberg’s lifelong interest in lyricism, traditional musical forms, as well as a personal preference for an aesthetic emphasizing plurality, often by means of musical quotation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For at least two decades, the studies on 19th century music and theater in Brazil have turned to approaches that prioritize exchanges, dialogues, transfers and appropriations between spaces, individuals, practices and social and cultural universes as an observation scale. This article is in line with this aspect and aims to shed some light on the fifteen years spent in Brazil by the Portuguese composer and violinist Francisco de Sá Noronha, a little-known period in his life. In it we defend the hypothesis that these years were of significant importance to transform Sá Noronha a cultural mediator on both sides of the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on political music of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which offers interesting source of choral literature from an era otherwise dominated by sacred oratorios, cantatas, and the mass. Topics include focuses on Franz Xaver Süßmayr whose operas and ballets were received by audiences in Europe's cultural centers.

Despite the 'acoustic turn' providing 'a corrective to the visualist bias of much scholarship on modern and postmodern culture', the Alice books and their author have been almost exclusively seen rather than heard by critics to date. Prompted by a collaboration with composer Paul Rissmann which resulted in a concert suite performed by the London Symphony Orchestra in 2015, in this article I undertake the first detailed exploration of the sonic dimension of these texts. This merits attention not only because of its very emphatic foregrounding within the frame narrative of Wonderland , but also because of authorial interests and preoccupations, and the quickly established and still enduring musical afterlife of the books. Although triggered in Wonderland by the pastoral and by the sounds of the natural world, a process of translation or transformation renders a very different sonic landscape within the narrative proper. The bucolic frames an often raucous modern core, with Carroll embedding not only catchy anodyne melodies but also the sounds of the everyday and of contemporary industry, transport, and material culture. Attending to the rich and varied soundscape of Carroll's best-known works sheds new light on their widely examined images but also restores a key dimension of the texts, essential to their Victorian reception. The detailed exploration of the full range of sonic phenomena within the works, from music to noise, and spanning both sound and silence, opens up new relationships between Carroll and his Victorian contemporaries, as well as further reinforcing his status as a proto-modernist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The violin, despite its fleeting appearances in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, has become prominently associated with the character of Sherlock in modern TV and film adaptions. While the violin is never investigated by Holmes in the stories, it is represented in more depth in a precursory detective story by William Crawford Honeyman: a Scottish author-musician, whose work appears to have influenced Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes. Honeyman's short story 'The Romance of a Real Cremona' (1884) follows detective James McGovan as he traces and returns a stolen Stradivari violin and unravels its complex provenance. The importance of the violin's inclusion in fictional works has been little discussed in scholarship. Here, the texts of Doyle and Honeyman serve as a lens through which to analyse the meaning of the violin during the Victorian era. By analysing the violin from an organological perspective, this article examines the violin's prominence in nineteenth-century British domestic music-making, both as a fiscally and culturally valuable object. The final section of the article explores the meaning attached to, and created by, the violin in the stories of Doyle and Honeyman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the often-overlooked Victorian guitar and its place in the musicological history of the long nineteenth century and in various canonical and non-canonical literary representations from those of Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Yonge to George Du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, in the light of some Victorian music historians' and contemporary organologists' search for a stringed cultural heritage extending to the far reaches of empire. Some Victorian music historians regarded instruments as developmental yardsticks, signifying a culture, nation, or people's evolutionary progress, a process belonging to what Patrick Brantlinger has called 'extinction discourse'. In the context of an interdisciplinary discussion of the guitar's position amid the period's obsession with uncovering origins and constructing archives, as well as fostering technical innovation—displayed at the Great Exhibition—and shifting modes of performance, this article argues that despite the changing instrument's rise in status over the period, literary representations adhered to older, sentimental, exotic, spiritual, and, increasingly decadent and homoerotic associations. Anxiety about decadence in concert with calls for preservation but also rationalization of salvaged cultural forms, including musical instruments, led some to advocate a type of musical eugenics, ostensibly to facilitate the creation of a new music of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs the biography of a musician of Spanish-French background whose name and existence have hitherto been unknown, the guitarist and singer Mariano Castro de Gistau (c. 1800–1856). He arrived in Britain around 1829, during the relatively brief period when the guitar was widely fashionable there. The article discusses the factors that created this fashion as well as some of the principal forces that would soon challenge the instrument's position and complicate the life of musicians like Castro (such as the rise of a canonical repertoire performed in concert halls built ever larger). Castro remained in the British Isles until his death in 1856, with a career unfolding mainly in provincial centres like Edinburgh, Dublin, Aberdeen and Cheltenham. Contemporary reviews show that he was a highly respected musician who appeared in concerts both as a guitarist and singer, often accentuating his Spanish background in the choice of repertoire. In addition to giving singing and guitar lessons, he was teaching the French language (increasingly so in later years when the guitar had lost much of its status) and after 1845 he was also engaged as a teacher in various private schools and academies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird was an immediate success upon its arrival in London in 1912. Nevertheless, as Stravinsky's music evolved with each subsequent ballet, his British reception equally evolved. While Stravinsky's supporters championed him as a new musical modernist, British conservative critics saw Stravinsky's music as a primitive threat to the traditional, nationalistic style that dominated nineteenth-century music. The analysis of both sides of the discourse that pervaded the early reception of Stravinsky's first three ballets in Britain – The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring – shows how these narratives helped shape Stravinsky's critical reception in twentieth-century Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the development of Ecuadorian national art music began at the end of the nineteenth century, composers and music historians followed European models and studied folklore as a window onto the past. In this quest to discover and articulate what was truly "Ecuadorian," Incan culture occupied a complex position, sometimes hailed as a primary component of Ecuador's musical heritage and sometimes dismissed as irrelevant. This article explores the music histories written by composers Pedro Pablo Traversari, Segundo Luis Moreno, and Sixto Mar'ıa Durán, and investigates a selection of Traversari's compositions and Moreno's music analyses. It demonstrates how they either included Incan culture in or excluded it from a national music history, in dialogue with scholars outside Ecuador. Early twentieth-century musical discourse in Ecuador produced a series of conflicting and converging perspectives on national and continental music that contribute to our understanding of the global history of nationalistic art musics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a model of enharmonic modulations based on transformations in resolution tendency. This model is an alternative to standard notational accounts of enharmonicism. The article explores similarities between enharmonic modulations and other musical phenomena involving tendency transformations. The model is applied in analyses of harmony, motive, and text in several nineteenth-century works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the privileged position that Glinka's Kamarinskaia (1848) has assumed in accounts of Russian instrumental music. The first half of the article investigates nineteenth-century reception of Glinka's orchestral works and demonstrates that his Jota Aragonese (1845) and Memory of a Summer Night in Madrid (1851) were just as popular as Kamarinskaia among Russian audiences of the time. It also traces the persistent references that critics such as Vladimir Stasov and Alexander Serov made to the organic qualities of all three of these orchestral fantasias. Although the variational techniques that Glinka employs in the fantasias have commonly been viewed as the very opposite of organic, Stasov and Serov appear to have been relying on a different theorization of musical organicism, namely that of Adolf Bernhard Marx. A Marxian framework helps to explain the popularity of Jota and Madrid alongside Kamarinskaia in nineteenth-century Russia, and it also provides an entry point for closer analytical investigations of the three fantasias. These analyses, comprising the second half of the article, illustrate certain distinguishing features of each fantasia as noted by nineteenth-century musicians and suggest that the fantasias represent highly divergent approaches to orchestral composition. Given the prominence of all three fantasias in nineteenth-century Russia, an awareness of these contrasting approaches allows for a more nuanced understanding of the compositional choices made by subsequent generations of Russian composers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The town of Nitra has long been an important historical town and an important episcopal residence. Remarkable music inventories were preserved from the 18th century and the early 19th century, although sheet music was preserved only to a smaller extent. From the monastic background, only the Inventarium Chori Nitriensis scholarum Piarum 1749 is preserved. Another centre of the cultural as well as musical life in Nitra was the seat of the bishop, the Nitra Castle, where other significant inventories of sheet music can be found from 1802 and 1814, which are among the largest inventories from this period in the territory of today's Slovakia. These sources are stored in the Diocesan Archive in Nitra and contain registries of music from the 18th and 19th centuries. The study presents the specificities of the records from these inventories, the method of their registration, and their transformation, with an emphasis on the presence of Italian music in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1943 Allied bombs destroyed the archives of Leoncavallo's publisher, Sonzogno and of the Teatro Dal Verme, where Pagliacci was first performed. As a result, many sources pertaining to the opera's compositional history were lost and scholarship has relied almost exclusively on Leoncavallo's unpublished autobiographical manuscript, "Appunti." Contextual sources such as notifications in the press, eyewitness accounts, and a large body of mostly unpublished correspondence now suggest that Leoncavallo cloaked the opera's genesis to protect its legacy. Leoncavallo was twice charged with having imitated an existing play. In his protracted defense, he took every opportunity to distinguish his libretto from the literary tradition to which it belongs and tie it instead to the verismo movement (with which critics had associated it since the premiere). He began to claim, for instance, that the libretto was based on a crime of passion he had witnessed in Montalto and invented a version of that crime that matched the libretto. Furthermore, in preparation of the first performance in Paris, he actively contributed to a staging faithfully depicting Montalto in an attempt to highlight the originality of the story. And as he was tightening the opera's connection to verismo, he was concealing aspects that would have reflected poorly on the opera's reception, including Sonzogno's initial concerns regarding the music and the presence of substantial musical self-borrowings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the French piano music in early 19th century and the improvisatory alteration in it. Topics discussed include the performances of piano music by several professional pianists at the time in France, who were not improvising; the periodical "Le Pianiste," which focused on piano music in France; and the repetitive nature of monochromatic performances.

The present paper focuses on the manner in which foreign cultures belonging to the Oriental world are represented in the opera "Samson et Dalila" composed by Camille Saint-Saëns. Orientalist art strives for the representation of the exotic and unknown, but at the same time it may point to those aspects of the "self" that need to be changed. In Saint-Saëns' opera two Oriental, but altoghether different cultures are portrayed, the Hebrews and the Philistines, the contrast between which could as well mirror the differences between East and West. Yet, the representation of the Orient is achieved mainly through the use of traditional Western componistic techniques and alterity is suggested in a very subtle manner, often through stereotypes. With "Samson et Dalila" Camille Saint-Saëns created an opera which anticipates the path of his successors, the harmonious union between music and dramatic action offering numerous possibilities of interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abandonment in the early nineteenth century of the Ottoman military bands (mehterhâne and tabl-khāne) that had provided ceremonial music for the Romanian princes, and the establishment of Western-style military bands in the newly formed army, brought about a radical shift in the cultural paradigm that was to have an effect upon the entire spectrum of musical life in the capitals of the Romanian provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia. This change occurred at two levels: on the one hand, musicians and the repertory current in noble salons were imported from the West, and, on the other, a native ethnic element was activated in a series of works and orchestrations based on folk themes. The present study examines the emergence, development and organization of the modern military bands in the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in the context of native musical practices and the transition of Romanian society from an oriental mentality to an outlook and behaviour specific to Western Europe, in the period from the nineteenth century to the War of Independence (1877). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Romanian composition in the nineteenth century went through rapid changes, moving from a Greek-oriental sound world to a Western European one. It is interesting to examine, in this context, the musicians’ quest for a ‘national’ sound and identity. Analysis of piano miniatures or vaudeville, the favourite genre of the Romanian audience in the first half of the century, shows eclectic combinations of urban folk music with sources of inspiration borrowed from popular foreign melodies. The second half of the century seems to be marked in modern scholarship by premieres: some composers are included in Romanian history just for the merit of writing the first Romanian symphony, the first string quartet, the first opera, and so forth. Their work led towards the constitution of a ‘national language’ adapted to genres borrowed from contemporary Western European music.In addition to demonstrating these ideas in the work of a number of Romanian composers (Josef Herfner, Ioan Andrei Wachmann, Anton Pann, Alexandru Flechtenmacher, Ludwig Anton Wiest, Carol Miculi, George Stephănescu, Constantin Dimitrescu, Gavriil Musicescu, Eduard Caudella, George Dima, Ciprian Porumbescu, Iacob Mureşianu, Dumitru Georgescu Kiriac, Alfonso Castaldi, Eduard Wachmann), the present article also encompasses two case studies. The first is Franz Liszt’s tour through the Romanian Countries, which offers a clearer image of the popular ideas circulating within the musical scene of the time. Liszt’s initiative to emphasize the national spirit through folk quotations reworked in rhapsodies should have inspired Romanian musicians; we will see whether this actually happened. The second case study concerns the musical life of Bucharest around 1900, when the directions of Romanian modern music were being traced, and cautious and selective steps were made toward harmonizing with Europe began. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, two widely different attitudes regarding local music were evident in the Romanian musical press. One viewpoint had an obviously nationalist character, and was manifested in an apologetic idealization of Romanian music – especially folklore – but also in calls for the improvement of composition and performance in the local music scene. The other attitude revealed a pronounced inferiority complex connected to everything that contemporary Romanian music represented. This was manifested especially in the (sometimes harsh) criticism of Romanian musical life, and in a hostile position towards or ignorance of Romanian musicians, composers or interpreters, except when they attained success and recognition abroad – and sometimes not even then. The two extreme attitudes are not mutually exclusive, but complement each other; essentially, they can be seen to be in a cause–effect relationship.These two faces of nationalist propaganda are reflected by publications such as Lyra română – foaie musicală şi literară, a weekly magazine published between 2 December 1879 and 31 October 1880, and România musicală, which appeared twice a month between 1 March 1890 and 28 December 1904. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on factors of the decline in popularity of tune-books in the U.S. It explores the arrival of other choral music formats that became standard in the 20th century and the factors similar to those that influenced the decline in popularity of tune-books in the 19th century. It also outlines the origin and development of the tune-books in the country.

This article proposes a pattern-based approach to early nineteenth-century music. Analyses of works by Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann illustrate that the "galant" schemata of the eighteenth century (as proposed by Gjerdingen 2007) continued to thrive well into the nineteenth century, albeit transformed according to composers' personal styles. Four schemata are discussed in particular: the Romanesca, the Monte-Romanesca, the Fenaroli, and the Prinner. The article explores the contrapuntal foundations of the schemata in particular and of tonal harmonic syntax in general. It ends with some recommendations concerning a reform of harmony education at music institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the implications of subjectivity and desire in 19th century music.

Of the two-dozen professions that emerged in nineteenth-century Britain, such as medicine, the law and the public service, music criticism was a late developer. This paper examines the social, economic and intellectual factors that led to the establishment of music criticism as a profession and the ways institutions such as the Musical Association and the Musical Times contributed to this process of professionalization. I argue that the path to making music criticism a creditable profession was neither a top-down nor bottom-up approach; rather it was a ubiquitous movement driven by newspapers readers, editors and composers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]