DEAR ABBÉ:
Anent the fracas in these pages on The Classical Style: were there musicologist-nerds before What's Up, Doc? (1972)?
LUMIÈRE, aîné & cadet
MESSIEURS:
Yes.
ABBÉ
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Batman 149 (1962) |
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Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, in the teenaged terrorist Omar's act II aria (1991) |
NOTE: Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week (Indiana UP) appeared in April 2014. Here is an excerpt.In the ritual year of early modern Catholics, the days before Easter represented the longest single commemoration, collective and personal, of the central events of salvation. Despite the survival or re-invention of historical Holy Week traditions today, it is still hard to imagine how much prayer and penitence were packed into the seventy-odd hours between the afternoons of Wednesday and Saturday. The three central days—the Triduum—recalling the Passion included the chanted words, participatory rites, and sonic behavior of liturgical Maundy Thursday (“Feria V in Coena Domini,” hereafter F5), Good Friday (“Feria VI in Parasceve,” hereafter F6), and Holy Saturday (“Sabbato Sancto,” hereafter SS). Beyond the structures of the Divine Office and Mass, there were community actions: processions, “entombments of Christ,” depositions from the Cross, ceremonies of mourning and weeping, and, less appealingly, group violence. The social re-enactment of Christ’s atonement went hand in hand with individual purging of sin via penance and often Confession. This dialectic between the audible expression of mourning and the internalization of remorse was vital for the Week’s meaning.
NOTE: The librettist of The Classical Style—an Opera of Sorts here responds to Kristi Brown-Montesano's post just below, adding “I felt it was necessary to respond, even if only to allay the sense that I was attacking musicology as a discipline—seeing as I count a good number of musicologists as among the most inspiring people I have ever met.”I was saddened, and not a little astonished, to see this response to The Classical Style. After having written a libretto based on Charles Rosen’s music-analytical tome, arguably the nerdiest opera ever written, to be accused of “American anti-intellectualism” in the comments is … strange?
Snibblesworth’s self-serving definition of classical music (“It’s music so beautiful that it has to be explained”) is played for laughs, but it’s hard to see how The Classical Style—both Rosen’s book and the opera—aren’t equally implicated.Agh! How humorlessly this poor laugh line is treated. (I can’t believe we’re having an academic discussion of the voice of Snibblesworth, but here we go!) When Snibs says this, it is a followup to a moment in the first scene, a moment when the same question is uttered by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven: “What’s Classical Music?” It’s a running gag, if you will, about the undefinability of the unavoidable term. Barthes observes that certain lines in prose float free of any particular voice, and become the sort of generalized voice of the author, or even author-less—this is what I had in mind here, I suppose. And of course the opera and this librettist and Rosen’s book are implicated! That’s the whole point. We’re all implicated. Snibblesworth is one of the least self-serving characters in this opera, anyway.
MORE NOTE: Brown-Montesano reponds: “Well, not that funny." Meanwhile, more press (from the Ojai North performance, Berkeley):
NOTE: Kendrick's Franke Forum at the University of Chicago occurred on October 13, 2013. The free lectures of the Chicago Humanities Forum seek to allow a larger audience exposure to the work of that university's leading scholars. Read more about the Franke Institute for the Humanities (named for supporters Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke) HERE.
NOTE: This article originally appeared on the OUP blog on 13 May 2014 and is reposted here by kind permission.
NOTE: Di goldene kale (The Golden Bride), a 1923 Yiddish-American operetta by Joseph Rumshinsky (1881–1956), was presented in a concert version with piano by the National Yiddish Theater–Folksbiene on 27 May 2014 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. The performance, in Yiddish with English and Russian supertitles, used a score prepared by Michael Ochs in conjunction with his critical edition forthcoming in Music of the United States of America (MUSA). The MUSA volume will include the full score, lyrics, and libretto in transliterated Yiddish, together with an English translation. This work will be the first from the entire Yiddish-American musical stage to appear in print in any form other than vocal scores of individual songs.
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Joseph Rumshinsky photo Ivan Busatt Museum of the City of New York |
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Le Russe prenant une Leçon de Grace à Paris Paris: Paul André Basset, 1815 Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library |
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Hans Ruckers the Elder Double Virginal, 1581 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York www.metmuseum.org |
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Orpheus among the Thracians Terra-cotta crater, c. 440 BC www.metmuseum.org |
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Édouard Manet: the great baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure (1830–1914), c. 1882–83—among Manet's last works www.metmuseum.org |
Leopold Mozart (1719–87)
Etching by Jacob Andreas Fridrich after a painting by G. Eichler, 1756.
Photo by Imagno/Getty Images.