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This article discusses Fulvio Testi's libretto “L'isola di Alcina” (1626), based on Ariosto's “Orlando furioso.” After considering its significance to the cultural politics of the Este and the author's preoccupations with poetical and political lineage, the essay focuses on the sorceress Alcina's lament in act 4 and its afterlife in the Baroque cantata repertoire. Echoes from Claudio Monteverdi and Ottavio Rinuccini's “Arianna” as well as the memory of the sorceress Armida from Torquato Tasso's “Gerusalemme liberata” are crucial to the gradual reshaping that, across poetry and music, transforms the evil character into a woman worthy of the audience's sympathy.

Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of a Medieval Composer , by Jennifer Bain. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xiii, 235 pp. A composer has surely “arrived” when not only her life and works are being studied but also her afterlife. In Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception Jennifer Bain asserts that, despite certain academic misgivings about the Hildegard “hype” among the “fandom” (p. 2), “in musicology, the Hildegard revival is in a sense complete” (p. 6). To cite just one example, the recent interdisciplinary Companion to Hildegard of Bingen (a companion of course in itself indicating her canonic status) synthesizes the research undertaken during and since the 1998 anniversary celebrations (another pointer toward Hildegard's unassailable position in European cultural history) and includes an overview of her reception, which historically has focused on her status as a saint and seer.1 Bain herself has written about the use of Hildegard's chants by the record industry,2 and her profound knowledge of the current popularity of the medieval composer is also apparent in the present book. Yet her overall aim is ultimately revisionist: she demonstrates that Hildegard was never really forgotten as a saint, visionary, founder of religious houses, and writer, and that she was rediscovered even as a composer long before the combined efforts of second-wave feminism and the record industry catapulted her music to global fame. In a beautifully common-sense definition of reception studies, Bain sets as her goal “to uncover …

COMPOSERS Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of a Medieval Composer. By Jennifer Bain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xiii, 235 p. ISBN 9781107076662 (hardcover), $99.99; ISBN 9781316309711 (e-book), $80.] Music examples, illustrations, discography, bibliography, index.In 2001, the Swedish folk-rock band Garmarna released an album titled Hildegard von Bingen, which featured modern, upbeat renderings of her medieval chants using electronic instruments and sequencers. The creativity of these settings by Garmarna is striking, and it is noteworthy that the author of the lyrics is the same Doctor of the Church celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI as a theologian, a teacher, and a model for Christians today. In fact, as Jennifer Bain makes plain in this straightforward and engaging book, it seems as though every generation has its own Hildegard.Bain begins by describing her own introduction to Hildegard von Bingen (1098- 1179) while a music student in the 1990s. She recalls that, at that time, it was hard to imagine that a woman composed music in the Middle Ages, and it was easy to assume that Hildegard had been rediscovered in the late twentieth century (p. 1). In fact, Bain's encounter with the significant body of evidence testifying to Hildegard's pronounced importance throughout the centuries after her death was the impetus for this book; she concluded that "the trope of the forgotten female figure" does not apply here (p. 35).Bain demonstrates that though Hildegard's story and her scholarship were known and cherished, especially in German-speaking lands, Hildegard's music was first performed and promoted in the mid-nineteenth century, through the efforts of Ludwig Schneider, who witnessed the dissolution of Hildegard's convent in 1814 and who served as a priest for the church housing Hildegard's relics in Eibingen. Bain tells the story of the revival of Hildegard's music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and her reception in those eras. As the author explains, reception reveals ideology, and studying the dynamics at play with regard to when and how Hildegard's writings and music were championed discloses both the personal agendas and the larger cultural forces at work. Although discussion of specific compositions by Hildegard is present in this volume, the primary emphases for this book are cultural and historical.After summarizing Hildegard's legacy, which was never truly forgotten in Germanspeaking lands, from her death until the 1850s, Bain emphasizes two revivals of Hildegard's music. The initial musical revival began in 1857, with the first modern performance of Hildegard's song "O virga ac diadema" ("O branch and diadem"). Ludwig Schneider, himself a scholar and musician, transcribed "O virga ac diadema" directly from the Riesencodex (a.k.a. the Wiesbaden Codex) so that it could be sung at a special service celebrating both the authentication of Hildegard's relics and Hildegard's own feast day on 17 September 1857 (also the anniversary of her passing). The Riesencodex dates from around the time of Hildegard's death, and it contains Hildegard's letters and writings as well as her Ordo virtutum and seventy-five of her seventy-seven chants. (Bain notes that the Riesencodex is freely accessible online at https://www.hs-rm.de/de/service /hochschul-und-landesbibliothek/suchenfinden/sondersammlungen/der-riesen codex-hildegards-von-bingen/ [accessed 27 June 2016].)Throughout her narrative, Bain quotes extensively from current literature on Hildegard as well as from historical sources. For example, Bain cites specific liturgical elements included in the 1857 service, such as the song "O Sancta Hildegardis," which was sung to the same tune as "Ave Maria Klare," and Schneider's own two-stanza antiphon "Ave Hildegardis" using Hildegard's name as an acrostic.Schneider's tireless efforts in studying and promoting of Hildegard in the nineteenth century can be understood in several lights. …

Since her death in 1179, Hildegard of Bingen has commanded attention in every century. In this book Jennifer Bain traces the historical reception of Hildegard, focusing particularly on the moment in the modern era when she began to be considered as a composer. Bain examines how the activities of clergy in nineteenth-century Eibingen resulted in increased veneration of Hildegard, an authentication of her relics, and a rediscovery of her music. The book goes on to situate the emergence of Hildegard's music both within the French chant restoration movement driven by Solesmes and the German chant revival supported by Cecilianism, the German movement to reform Church music more generally. Engaging with the complex political and religious environment in German speaking areas, Bain places the more recent Anglophone revival of Hildegard's music in a broader historical perspective and reveals the important intersections amongst local devotion, popular culture, and intellectual activities.

The Beatles recorded two starkly different musical settings of John Lennon's controversial 1968 song “Revolution”: One was released as a single, the other appeared on the White Album (as “Revolution 1”). Lennon's lyrics express deep skepticism about political radicalism, and the single, with its lines “But when you talk about destruction/… you can count me out,” incited rage among critics and activists on the Left. Lennon appears less opposed to violent protest in “Revolution 1”—recorded first, though released later—where he sang “you can count me out—in.” The reception of “Revolution” reflected a focus on the words and their apparent political meanings, largely ignoring the musical differences between the two recordings of the song. Moreover, the response to “Revolution” had much to do with public perceptions of the Beatles. Their rivals the Rolling Stones, seen as a more radical alternative voice, released the equally political “Street Fighting Man” at virtually the same moment in 1968. The much more favorable public reaction to the latter had at least as much to do with the way the bands themselves were perceived as with differences between the songs.

Throughout the nineteenth century, massive quantities of four-hand piano transcriptions were published of virtually every musical genre. Indeed, no other medium before the advent of the radio and phonograph was arguably so important for the dissemination and iterability of concert and chamber repertories. Yet such transcriptions proved to be anything but innocent vehicles of translation. Not only did these four-hand arrangements offer simplified facsimiles of most orchestral works blanched of their instrumental timbres (a result that was often compared to the many reproductive engravings and black-and-white lithographs of artworks that were churned out by publishers at the same time); such arrangements also destabilized traditional musical divisions between symphonic and chamber genres, professional and amateur music cultures, and even repertories gendered as masculine and feminine. By bringing music intended for the public sphere of the concert hall, opera house, and salon into the domestic space of the bourgeois home parlor, the four-hand transcription profoundly altered the generic identity and consequent reception of musical works.

Eduard Steuermann (1892–1964), Austrian-Polish-Jewish pianist from Galicia, student of Busoni, teacher and friend of Adorno, exiled American, sought-after soloist and pedagogue between Vienna, New York and Darmstadt, sought throughout his life the "almost impossible": to reconcile truth and beauty in uncompromising "devotion to music". The esteem in which he was held as the most important pianist for the establishment of New Piano Music, not only by the Viennese Schoenberg circle, has had a lasting effect on an appreciation of his person that goes beyond this. In 14 contributions that look at Steuermann from very different angles – discussing his life, his family and artistic ties, his music-making and composing, his work as a teacher and witty author – the view of the breadth of his work is widened on the basis of numerous previously unexplored materials, and the portrait of an artist who, according to Adorno, embodied the "conscience" of music itself is drawn., Eduard Steuermann (1892–1964), österreichisch-polnisch-jüdischer Pianist aus Galizien, Schüler Busonis, Lehrer und Freund Adornos, Exil-Amerikaner, gefragter Solist und Pädagoge zwischen Wien, New York und Darmstadt, hat zeitlebens das "beinahe Unmögliche" gesucht: in kompromissloser "Hingabe an die Musik" Wahrheit und Schönheit zu versöhnen. Die Wertschätzung, die ihm als dem wichtigsten Pianisten für die Etablierung Neuer Klaviermusik nicht nur des Wiener Schönberg-Kreises entgegengebracht wurde, hat einer darüber hinausgehenden Würdigung seiner Person nachhaltig entgegengewirkt. In 14 Beiträgen, die Steuermann von sehr unterschiedlichen Seiten betrachten – sein Leben, seine familiären und künstlerischen Bindungen, sein Musizieren und Komponieren, sein Wirken als Lehrer und geistvoller Autor erörtern –, wird anhand zahlreicher bisher unerschlossener Materialien der Blick auf die Breite seines Schaffens geweitet und das Porträt eines Künstlers gezeichnet, der nach Adorno das "Gewissen" der Musik selbst verkörperte.

Vários autores (Ferreira, 1995; Schick, 1996; Carroll, 2009) apontam que a crítica musical cumpre uma função que se pode qualificar de pedagógica pois deve orientar os leitores para a recepção e compreensão das obras tocadas. Neste artigo analiso alguns aspectos da crítica musical escrita por Francine Benoît à luz deste princípio, tendo como ponto de partida diversos exemplos de comentários feitos por Benoît às obras tocadas em concerto (em particular a obras em primeira audição) e à interpretação e técnica dos músicos. As críticas de música analisadas foram recolhidas no Diário de Lisboa e escritas entre 1924 e 1934, década que corresponde aos primeiros de muitos anos de colaboração de Francine Benoît com aquele jornal. The pedagogical role of music criticism: Francine Benoît’s music reception in Diário de Lisboa. Several authors (Ferreira, 1995; Schick, 1996; Carroll, 2009) state that music criticism has a role that can be qualified as pedagogical, since it must guide their readers for the reception and understanding of the musical works played at the concert. In this article I analyze some characteristics of music criticism written by Francine Benoît under this principle. To begin with, I will analyze several examples of reviews and comments made by Benoît concerning the works played at the concert (in particularly first auditions of works) as well as the musicians’ interpretation and technic qualities. The music criticism analyzed were published in Diário de Lisboa between 1924 and 1934, the first ten years of many during which she wrote in that newspaper.