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The works of Panamanian composer Roque Cordero (1917-2008), despite their prominence, remain understudied and poorly understood. Most authors describe Cordero's music as serial but not 'strictly' so. Thorough analysis reveals that such a characterization is unfounded, as Cordero employs comparable techniques of row development to those found in the mature works of renowned composers such as Schoenberg, Webern, and Babbitt. This article demonstrates that Cordero's approach to twelve-tone method was anything but 'loose' and explores why such misperceptions have gone unquestioned for six decades. keywords: Roque Cordero, serialism, analysis, reception, Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek Las obras del compositor panameño Roque Cordero, a pesar de su prominencia, son muy poco estudiadas y mal entendidas. La mayoría de los autores describen a su música dentro del estilo del serialismo, pero no 'exclusivamente'. Algunos análisis exhaustivos revelan que tal caracterización carece de fundamento, porque Cordero emplea técnicas dodecafónicas comparables a aquellas encontradas en las obras de madurez de los compositores renombrados tales como Schoenberg, Webern y Babbitt. Este artículo demuestra que el acercamiento de Cordero al serialismo no fue para nada 'vago' y explora porqué tales percepciones erróneas no han ido cuestionadas por más de casi seis décadas. palabras clave: Roque Cordero, serialismo, análisis, recepción, Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek, The late Roque Cordero (1917-2008) remains to this day the premier composer of art music from his native Panama, known for his trademark synthesis of high-modernist techniques with the rhythms [...]

In this photograph from 1937 (see fig. 1), Vernon Duke (left) and Ira Gershwin (right) huddle at the piano, presumably collaborating on a song for a Hollywood film musical. Yet [...]

This essay discusses the problems of authorship concerning free improvisation. It looks at three areas: collaboration, education, and emerging processes. There has been a recent trend for introducing spontaneous and collaborative elements into contemporary classical music projects. The current essay examines problems concerning how to nurture, present and disseminate new forms within very established formats. Even though free improvisation offers a medium in which to develop complementary crossover skills between composition and performance, this essay will discuss the impossibilities for a composer or performer (working in their respective fields) to claim authorship of a collaborative performance between free improvisation and composition. It identifies the free improvisation performance as an ephemeral, emerging process that does not create a product--that is, it is a process resistant to institutionalised assessment and ownership. Keywords: Art Product; Emergent Process; John Dewey; George E. Lewis; Inner Repository; Free Improvisation DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2010.587314

Several interrelated developments have radically affected the musical and cultural landscape over the past century, shaping conceptions of 'new' music in profound ways. These include: the development and proliferation of sound recording technologies and electronic methods of sound production/reproduction; increased contact between musical traditions and systems of musical logic from previously disparate cultural and social locations; the re-emergence of real-time modes of music-making in Western music after an almost complete absence of nearly 150 years; a great expansion in the range of sonic resources available to creative practitioners; the breakdown of old cultural hierarchies including such artificial constructs as 'high' and 'low' cultures. Drawing on my experiences as a composer, improviser, and sound artist, I examine the social, musical, and ideological implications of these musical/cultural vectors, as well as the ways in which they intersect with one another in the field of contemporary music. Keywords: Improvisation; Composition; Recording Technology; Class; Race; Gender DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2010.535367

This article traces the literary origins of the 1945 'zero hour' concept and explores its relation and importance to post-war avant-garde music, as well as the power of its concomitant polemics. The apparent hegemony of the resulting total serialist music and its associated ideas of newness and history are questioned and then compared to the reaction against it in the 1960s, when radical ideas about man's relationship with, and understanding of, time and history grew. It is suggested that the real break with the past began then rather than in the immediate post-war period. Keywords: Zero Hour; Tabula Rasa; Serialism; Quotation; Newness; Nostalgia DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2010.535357

This article considers the use of female archetypes in recent text-settings. The author notes the use of gendered analogies for discussing interdisciplinary work, comments on the depiction of women in opera, and focuses on recent works by Heiner Goebbels and Dominique le Gendre. He assesses the importance of the mute role in Gerald Barry's opera The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (2005), considers the recreation of the Diana myth in The Assassin Tree (2004), and comments on Judith Weir's setting of Emily Dickinson. Keywords: Gender; Text-setting; Collaboration; Reception; Opera; Weir; Libretto; Goebbels; Le Gendre; Barry; Weir; Dickinson DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2010.534930

This text--in fact a set of two texts--is an important contribution to the understanding of Clementi's aesthetic and is the most extensively self-reflective writing of his career. An excerpt from this brief essay appeared in print soon after the original 1979 publication in Autobiografia della musica contemporanea, but this occasion marks the first time that the text has been translated in full. The translator has attempted to be faithful to the quirks of Clementi's literary style, which is highly allusory and difficult. On a purely superficial level, he uses far more dashes and parentheses than the translator usually would, for instance! The translator's role was to be idiomatic, while preserving as much as possible. Keywords: Autobiography; Canons; Clementi, Aldo (1925-); Graphic Notation; Informel; Premio Italia; Visual Music DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2009.494052

In 1801, some ten years after Mozart's death, The Magic Flute was performed in Paris as Les Mysteres d'Isis (The Mysteries of Isis). It bore little resemblance to the Flute […]

The article describes French pianist and composer Charles-Valentin Alkan's 'Souvenirs: Trois morceaux dans le genre pathetique, op.15' that encodes a specific extramusical meaning and the understanding between the composer and his performer of the eigthteenth-century tradition.

The article discusses about Samuel Barber's whose Adagio for strings has been nominated by listeners as the saddest piece of music and the process by which it has accumulated such a reputation illustrates the power of mass media and popular reception in determining this music's symbolic place.

The lack of closure in many of Mahler's movements and works effected by delay, interpolation and suspension are analyzed to explore their function of splitting the succession of events into different lines of time and action streams. His abrupt shifts of tone and avoidance of closure, which refer back to the past through recurrence and reminiscence, are seen to allow for the creation of several alternative interpretations characteristic of modernity.

An approach that treats tempo relations as intervals is presented, together with analytical examples and suggestions for compositional use. In addition, the opportunities and constraints imposed by Elliot Carter's use of large polyrhythms in his music are discussed.

A study aimed to assess the ability of North American adults to synchronize and continue their tapping to complex meter patterns in the presence and absence of musical cues to meter. Results demonstrate that people raised in North America find it difficult to produce complex metrical patterns, particularly in the absence of exogenous cues and even when they are provided with musical stimuli to aid them in tapping accurately.

Thomas Morley's work ' A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke' contains instructions that bear directly on the question of music composition, which includes his rules for first-species cannon. Some interpretations of Morely's first-species cannon are discussed.

Richard Taruskin's criticism of the 19th- and 20th-centruy volumes of the 'Cambridge History of Music' is refuted. It is argued that a collaborative history is not a compromised version of a single-authored history, with the greater degree of subject specialization making up for the inevitable absence of a single interpretive vision.

The early-music revival provoked much heated debate in the second half of the 19th century, most of it centered on the issue of continuo realization, a topic in which Franz, through his performing and arranging activities, had a vested interest. The tensions between Robert Franz, Johannes Brahms and Friedrich Chrysander are explored, together with Brahms's approach to continuo realization in the context of the disagreement among musicologists about how the music should be performed.

The allegorical meaning of the heroine as transcendent author/composer contributes to the understanding of Beethoven in his cultural context because it shifts attention to the late Enlightenment's discourse of heroism. A case study of Beethoven's incidental music to Goethe's 'Egmont' traces a metonymic chain linking the lead female character to music, heroic overcoming, and authorship.

The thought beneath so slight a film Is more distinctly seen As laces just reveal the surge Or Mists the Apennine --Emily Dickinson Introduction In recent years, a number of [...]

Antechamber: Bach and Space Architecture, so the saying goes, is 'frozen music.' Music, conversely, is 'liquid' architecture. (1) This aphorism, popular in the early nineteenth century, soon became a cliche. [...]

Compositions, in terms of music that are organized according to an aesthetic of relative silence leave aural space, and the microsound elicits a unique subjectivity. The historical development both in terms of microsound's reliance upon technology and the minimalist tendency towards an inaudible abstraction distinguishes microsound from kindred genres, from the techno-inspired rhythmic minimalism of clicks and cuts and ultimately links it to the philosophical and social implications of 4'33.

A discussion on Milton Babbitt's poetry, meta-musical texts, his musical philosophy and theory of music is presented. His writings do not purport to describe music, but they describe what is in it, how and of what it might be made, what might be admired and valued about it. In this sense, his affinity with the literature of logical philosophy is substantive, yet it is truly the verbal-philosophical reflection of his sounding music.

A brief survey is provided of each of the leading composers of the Viennese Classical School seeking to explore the possibilities in the implied creation scenarios that began with the opening Adagio of Mozart's 'Dissonance' Quartet.

An attempt is made to clarify the several contrasting arguments or il caso Scelsi, about the class and background of Giacinto Scelsi in relation to his music. The article shows how the reception of Scelsi's music is influenced by the broader narratives of the aristocracy's decline.

Sergey Prokofiev composed 'Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October' in order to win favor with Soviet cultural officials, but his decision to set authentic texts by Lenin, Marx, and Stalin, together with his decision to edit these texts to ensure musical cohesion, proved to be highly controversial. The Cantata was severely criticized by the Committee of Artistic Affairs in 1937 and was barred from performance, a setback to which Prokofiev responded by retooling his creative methods and composing a Party-line paean to Stalin.

Anti-enthusiastic discourses shaped musical and dramatic practices in the Restoration era, as witnessed in two songs for enthusiastic prophets, Cumana in Nathaniel Lee's 'Sophonisba' and the elderly Brahmin priest n Peter Moteux's revision of 'The Island Princess'. A detailed examination of the music, dramatic texts, and contemporary political, religious, and medical discourses demonstrates how musical representations of enthusiasm were affected by the critical rhetoric of religious orthodoxy.

A systematic and historically grounded approach to the notion of lyrical form in Franz Schubert might be established by appealing to the rhetorical distinction between hypotaxis and parataxis, which pervaded late 18th-century discussions of both music and language. Schubert evoked the lyric within the context of the sonata as a means of reunifying the dissociated sensibility of the Enlightenment, thus securing a place for the poetic imagination in instrumental music.

John Cage's 'Letters to Erik Satie' were composed in Milan, dated May 6 and May 7, 1978, and C.F Peters Corporation has published this, which makes them widely available for study and performance. The completeness and simultaneity within the mesostic microcosm reflect Zen concepts of unimpededness and interpenetration, core principles in Cage's aesthetic philosophy.

This essay examines Mozart's relationship to the Wendling family and the French ariettes he wrote during his visit to Mannheim. Through documentary evidence we glimpse the underside of court life, [...]

A study to isolate the individual from the common-coin in late 17th- and early 18th-century Italian style as a means, not only of resolving the authorship of the Gloria, but also of substantiating the sense of what constitutes a musical borrowing is illustrated. It re-examines the case, first made by Hans Joachim Marx, for attributing the Gloria, HWV deest, to Handel by focusing on passages it shares with known works by the composer.

The area of music studies that would profit most from the changing climate is opera studies and the insight that the musical work cannot be equated with a score and that performance is more than the execution of an ideally self-sufficient text, which was so hard-won in the field as a whole, is nowhere as seemingly self-evident as in opera. No other genre illustrates quite so clearly that music is an embodied art involving human action, and that it cannot be reduced to its acoustic dimension.