Journal of Musicology
Dados do Periódico
| Tipo | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Editora | University of California Press (US) |
| ISSN | 0277-9269 / 1533-8347 |
| Scopus | 14000155925 |
| OpenAlex | S164193622 |
| MAG | 164193622 |
| Site | http://www.ucpressjournals.com/journal.asp?j=jm |
| Total de publicações | 138 |
| Período coberto | 1983 - 2026 |
| País | US |
| Idioma | EN |
| Indexação | Scopus |
| Citada por | 43 |
| Fator de impacto | 0.186 |
| SJR | 0.144 (Q2) |
| SNIP | 1.214 |
| CiteScore | 0.5 |
| Índice h | 4 |
| Índice i10 | 1 |
| Participação feminina na autoria | 33.3% |
The Journal of Musicology focuses on the academic study of music. Ethnomusicology is a direct subfield of anthropology, making this journal closely cognate and highly relevant to anthropological scholarship on music
Music · Arts, Culture, and Music Studies · Bach Studies and Logistics Development · Big Data and Digital Economy · Cinema and Media Studies · Diverse Music Education Insights · Diverse Musicological Studies · Diverse Scientific and Economic Studies · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Early Modern Spanish Literature
Marquis Hill’s Modern Flows
In this article, I make a methodological intervention into Black music studies by arguing for greater consideration of “metapragmatic indexicality,” as theorized by linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein (1976, 1993, 2003), in examining Black musical identity formation. More specifically, I wish to address how metapragmatic indexicals from Black musical history “calibrate” the pragmatic level of musical signs and pull them into a configura…
The Male Siren
The countertenor has featured prominently in new opera ever since its reemergence in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite its prevalence, the sound of a countertenor—for audience members and composers alike—remains marked not only as a novel timbre but also as a sign of hybridity, as an “ethereal, angelic-demonic” voice (Aucoin). As Anthony Roth Costanzo put it, there is “something about the countertenor voice which is both very primal and old...but also…
Framing Dido
Jean-Joseph Mouret’s contribution to the French cantata in the early eighteenth century has usually been viewed as slight in comparison to that of his contemporaries, such as Nicolas Bernier and André Campra. Because Mouret published only one collection of four cantatas in 1729 and the cantata Didon as a single work without a date, his contribution to the offshoot called the cantatille in the 1730s has been viewed as more significant. However, th…
Thing and Form
Early nineteenth-century attempts to visualize sound waves are traceable across experimentalists from William Swan and John Tyndall to Helmholtz, Jules Lissajous, and Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. A combination of optical and graphic methods proliferated during the 1850s and 1860s, all of which relied—directly or indirectly—on the isochrony of the pendulum. Léon Foucault’s 1851 pendulum experiment to demonstrate the imperceptible rotation of…
Hope in the Face of Adversity
The rising sun is a recurring symbol in Handel’s oratorios, commonly associated with hope, renewal, and triumph over darkness. Yet depictions of sunrise in these works are far from uniform, and closer examination reveals that the color of the morning sky has greater significance than has been acknowledged. In Theodora and Samson, “rosy” and “cloudy red” mornings are mentioned ahead of looming crises: Irene, in Theodora (part 1), sings “As with ro…
For Only the Rich They Sing? “Popular Price” Opera for Immigrant Audiences in Early Twentieth-Century New York
The flashing jewels and cultural clout displayed by wealthy early twentieth-century New Yorkers at their favored operatic institutions have blinded most modern-day observers to the existence of a parallel—and sometimes overlapping—world of so-called “cheap” or “popular price” opera. Given in Italian, French, Yiddish, German, and Russian, these performances primarily targeted Italian and Jewish immigrant audiences, offering them access to some of …
The Invisible Music of Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe
In Alain Corneau’s biopic Tous les matins du monde, a few suggestive sentences in a brief eighteenth-century narrative about the enigmatic gambist known simply as Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe become the basis for a meditation on music’s role in society. Should a musician live a solitary existence and treat his music as a private outlet for spiritual expression? Or should he engage in public life and pursue a professional career, so that his music c…
Gerardo Gandini’s Play with Allusions
Robert Schumann’s music represents a key source of non-original materials for an extended series of works that the Argentine composer Gerardo Gandini developed from the 1980s until the end of his creative career. Rsch: Escenas for piano and orchestra (1983–84), the first work in the series, reinterprets Schumann’s concept of cycle, emphasizing its fragmentary and self-reflexive nature. The work comprises fourteen brief numbers, twelve of which ar…
Historicizing the Discourse of Postmodernism in Music
In this article, I argue that the use of the term “postmodern” among musicians in the United States is older than scholars usually recognize. I further argue that such early uses were more closely tied to the movement broadly known as the “counterculture” and its values than most previous accounts have suggested. In particular, I show how the term was used to critique what was known at the time as the “technocracy” or “technocratic society”—a soc…
Henry Cowell
Most of Henry Cowell’s political inclinations lay relatively dormant until 1929, a year that saw the confluence of several crucial events. In May he returned from an extraordinary visit to the Soviet Union, in October the New York stock market crashed, and in January 1930 Cowell became a regular faculty member at the New School for Social Research, an unorthodox progressive educational institution in New York City known as a hotbed for left-wing …
The Mass-Produced Miniature Score and the Classical Chamber Canon
This article examines an understudied genre of music publication that gained popularity in the final decades of the nineteenth century: the mass-produced miniature score. While there had been earlier attempts at small-format publishing, it was in 1886 that the Leipzig-based firm Albert Payne started to issue its Kleine Partitur-Ausgabe—a series of cheap, pocket-sized scores of canonical chamber works sold to music lovers in Germany, Austria, and …
The Question of Music
In 1923 the newly established Irish Free State swiftly passed the Censorship of Films Act. The act was considered an essential measure for confronting the perceived moral threat that cinema posed to the young, fragile Catholic state. James Montgomery was appointed Ireland’s first film censor in that same year, a post he held until 1940. Montgomery took his job seriously and banned or censored hundreds of films, calling himself a “moral sieve.” Re…
Financial Incentives for Music Scholarship
Few figures were as consequential for the study of early music in the twentieth century as Armen Carapetyan. In 1944 he founded the American Institute of Musicology, an organization that has since published a wealth of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music. But the full impact of AIM has not yet been acknowledged—above all, how Carapetyan changed the course of musicological research by offering scholars significant financial incentives to produc…
When Is the Brilliant Style Not the Brilliant Style? Topical Mention, Ambivalence, and Negation in Mozart and Beethoven
In the recent scholarship on topic theory, it is generally assumed that the identification and labeling of topics serves as the first and most important step in the process of producing a topical reading of a piece of music, either in analysis or performance. Yet this framing rests on the premise that pieces of music sustain an unambivalent relationship with the topics referenced within them—that is, that topics constitute, rather than problemati…
The Lost Art of Harmonic Variation in Eighteenth-Century Hymn Accompaniment in the German Lutheran Church
The discovery in 2007 of a previously unknown Choralbuch manuscript has prompted reassessment of eighteenth-century hymn accompaniment in the German Lutheran Church. The manuscript—attributed to Johann Christian Kittel (1732–1809), the only pupil of J. S. Bach to see the nineteenth century—bears witness to a significant tradition of improvisatory practice within European church music and one that is recorded in only a small number of other source…
Silent Voices, Sacred Songs
This article investigates the contributions of women to religious music through study of forty-nine music manuscripts attributed to María Téllez Girón, a music copyist active in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexico. Preserved in the Mexico City Cathedral Archive, these manuscripts shed light on Téllez Girón’s role in sustaining sacred music traditions amid political and religious upheaval. Her distinctive music calligraphy, authent…
Bernard Herrmann’s Memory Waltzes
While various writers have noted the persistence of waltzes in Bernard Herrmann’s film scores (Steven Smith, Christopher Palmer) and have remarked on their nostalgic tone and narrative purposes (Kathryn Kalinak, Graham Bruce, Steven Smith), the frequent association between waltz and memory in Herrmann’s music warrants further critical exploration. Many of Herrmann’s waltzes narrate the experience of memory, loss, and longing while representing co…
Women’s Labor and the History of Music Theory
If in recent decades the field of music theory has seen a reduction in inequalities in gender representation, its histories remain sites of stark imbalance. Rather than working to increase the representation of women as authors of music-theoretical texts, this article seeks to recognize the contributions of women to histories that we already (think we) know. Turning to Therese Marx and Jeanette Schenker, the spouses of two influential theorists, …
Per florida ad astra
The eleventh-century manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 38 is celebrated for its remarkable monastic horologium, or star timetable, which uses the stars to determine the timing of the Night Office liturgy. Recent scholarship has confirmed the long-held supposition that it was created for the Abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, also known as Fleury. This article considers the six items of liturgical chant and chant embellishments that wer…
The Hidden Poetics of Messiaen’s “Serialism”
Interpretation of Messiaen’s piano étude Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949) as an exercise in the application of serialism to parameters beyond pitch has enshrined the work as a milestone in modernist music historiography. This article brings to light another intellectual current that played at least as significant a role in his formal experimentation during this period, namely the scientific study of poetic rhythm. I begin by sketching how M…
An Intimate Economy
The 1957 Donaueschingen Festival provided high-profile visibility for Nachstücke und Arien, a new work in which Gloria Davy sang Hans Werner Henze’s settings of Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry. Only moments into the first movement, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono left the performance in protest at Henze’s stylistic conventions, thereby missing the opportunity to hear the first work with a text written by a woman and the first perfo…
Camping Empire
In 1781 William Thomas Beckford (1760–1844) inherited a vast colonial fortune built on West Indian sugar and slavery. To mark the occasion, his guardians commissioned a cantata from Venanzio Rauzzini (with words by Girolamo Tonioli) and enlisted the renowned castrati Gasparo Pacchierotti and Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci to perform it. More than a simple panegyric, Il tributo was a thinly veiled attempt at “straightening out” the young man’s perceiv…
Bang, Rattle, Pop
The South African War of 1899–1902 has been traditionally framed as one of Britain’s final colonial wars and a last gasp of nineteenth-century military conventions. In this article, I argue that—far from being the last “gentlemen’s war”—the South African War can be seen as a newly modern form of warfare that is mediated and modulated through sound. I draw on archival research and earwitness accounts from both combatants and observers to reconstru…
Singing through Anticlerical Storms
Amid nationwide debates in Third Republic France as to whether good Catholics could serve the church but also “rally” to the Republic, a project to set up a municipal/national music school in Moulins, to the financial detriment of the local cathedral choir school, suggests an environment of straightforward musical and confessional antagonism. The close-up view is more complex, however. Long-standing alliances among musicians and clerics turn out …
“Opening Up the Future”
This article considers Hugh Tracey’s 1952 book African Dances of the Witwatersrand Gold Mines in relation to the history of music scholarship in southern Africa. Its first finding is that sound recordings and archives were crucial in the making of disciplines such as ethnomusicology and ethnology in Africa, and that Hugh Tracey was at the forefront of this process, especially in southern Africa. Its second finding is that Tracey’s project contrib…
Analyzing Music Under the New Musicological Regime
Research Article| July 01 1997 Analyzing Music under the New Musicological Regime Kofi Agawu Kofi Agawu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Musicology (1997) 15 (3): 297–307. https://doi.org/10.2307/763911 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citatio…
The Ethnomusicologist and the Transmission of Tradition
Research Article| January 01 1996 The Ethnomusicologist and the Transmission of Tradition Kay Kaufman Shelemay Kay Kaufman Shelemay Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Musicology (1996) 14 (1): 35-51. https://doi.org/10.2307/763956 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permi…
A Broader View of Musical Exoticism
Most previous writings on musical exoticism reflect the unspoken assumption that a work is perceived by the listener as exotic only if it incorporates distinctively foreign or otherwise highly unusual elements of musical style. This "Exotic Style Only" Paradigm often proves revelatory, especially for purely instrumental works. In operas and other musicodramatic works set in exotic locales, by contrast, music is heard within a narrative "frame" th…
We Are All Musicologists Now”; or, the End of Ethnomusicology
Situated in the context of current examinations of academic disciplinarity, this article contributes to the decades-long discussions (or debates) regarding the status of ethnomusicology, arguing forcefully for the (sub-)discipline’s cessation. A focus on ethnomusicology’s very prefix, “ethn-”, exposes the field’s historical and continuing reliance upon colonialist ideology, continually reproduced in relation to both ethnicity (constructed in rela…
The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-Hop Music
Multiple factors contributed to the elevation of jazz as "high art" in mainstream media reception by the 1980s. The stage was thus set for hip-hop groups in the late-1980s and early 90s (such as Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest, and Digable Planets) to engage in a relationship with jazz as art and heritage. "Jazz codes" in the music, said to signify sophistication, helped create a rap-music subgenre commonly branded "jazz rap." Connections may be…
Did Vitry write an Ars vetus et nova
In book 7 of his Speculum musicae, the fourteenth-century music theorist Jacobus structures a defense of music as it had been practiced in the thirteenth century by such eminent musicians and theorists as Lambertus, Franco, and Petrus de Cruce against the practices of certain unnamed moderni active at the time of Jacobus’s writing. While Jacobus’s quotations from various theoretical works by Jehan des Murs have long been recognized, it previously…
Anonymous IV as an Informant on the Craft of Music Writing
For the 13th-century music writer known as Anonymous IV, the craft of music writing was a primary literary concern, though one virtually ignored by previous modern writers on music. The importance of music writing to Anonymous IV is evident from the variety and quantity of references in his treatise, many of which are found in its central second chapter. This information-rich chapter includes a history of music notation and a miniature handbook f…
Forgotten Histories of the Audiobook
This article investigates the different affordances of magnetic tape and print as they are entextualized in various co(n)texts by writers, ethnographers, and musicians throughout the Americas in the late 1960s. I analyze printed books made from tape recordings-Cuban anthropologist Miguel Barnet and his interview subject Esteban Montejo's Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave, 1966), Rodolfo Walsh's true-crime denunciation ¿Quién …
Composing Authority in Six Forged “Haydn” Sonatas
In December 1993 news broke that six keyboard sonatas whose rediscovery was being hailed as “The Haydn Scoop of the Century” were, in fact, not by Haydn at all. It soon emerged that the compositions—initially believed to be the lost Hob. XVI:2a–e and 2g—were not simple misattributions, but rather something that has rarely been discussed in the music world: modern forgeries deliberately constructed to deceive scholars and listeners. Adapting philo…
Assembled Landscapes
This article examines the folding together of music and landscape in some recent albums featuring the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute that today animates an active and international music scene. Through analysis of the texts, images, and sounds on these albums, I explore the re-imagining of the shakuhachi's musical geography as the instrument reaches new players and places in Europe, Australia, and North America. Using recordings that incorpo…
Intellectual Contexts of “the Absolute” in French Musical Aesthetics, ca. 1830–1900
In 1895 the critic Édouard Dujardin reviewed a production of an Offenbach opera in a brief article titled “De la Périchole et de l’Absolu dans la musique.” That Dujardin invoked the term “absolute” in a discussion of a stage work suggests that, for him, “the absolute in music” was defined by something other than the presence or absence of texts. Moreover, that Dujardin uses the phrase “absolute in music” rather than “absolute music” suggests the …
Violons en basse as Musical Allegory
An unusual type of orchestration sometimes called violons en basse is encountered in arias by French Baroque composers, including Couperin, Campra, and Rameau. In such pieces, the basse continue line is played by violins or violas notated in a high clef; the solo voice and any additional obbligato instruments remain in the treble register as well. This phenomenon has gone practically unnoticed by modern scholars and was seemingly unremarked upon …
Heinrich Isaac among the Florentines
In the archives of the old and wealthy patrician family of the “da Filicaia” housed in the Florentine Archivio di Stato survives a group of letters written by, among others, one Ambrogio Angeni to the young Antonio da Filicaia, away on family business in northern Europe for extended periods of time during the 1480s and 1490s. The correspondence details the musical activities of these young men's Florentine brigata and reveals a close involvement …
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Research Article| July 01 1989 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Radical and Traditional Views in His Dictionnaire de musique Cynthia Verba Cynthia Verba Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Musicology (1989) 7 (3): 308–326. https://doi.org/10.2307/763603 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissi…
In Memoriam Dragan Plamenac
Research Article| October 01 1984 In Memoriam Dragan Plamenac: The L'Homme Arme Masses of Busnoys and Okeghem: A Comparison Leeman L. Perkins Leeman L. Perkins Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Musicology (1984) 3 (4): 363–396. https://doi.org/10.2307/763587 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon T…
Song, Confession, and Criminality
In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the city government of Augsburg, Germany, struggled to maintain religious peace as the confessional boundaries between its Catholic and Protestant communities hardened. As tensions gradually rose, city officials feared and scrutinized the disruptive potential of the psalms and chorales sung by Augsburg's Protestant majority. Those suspected of owning, singing, or distributing inflammatory songs were subj…
The Honnête homme as Music Critic
The French concept of Taste (goût) has largely been viewed from an 18th-century tradition of aesthetics in which philosophers attempted to incorporate it into a rationalized systematic theory of musical expression. Its original 17th-century usage, however, was derived from the principles of classical rhetoric and noble etiquette, or politesse. Following the tenets of Cicero communicated by humanist writers, these principles require the ideal gent…
Violons en basse as Musical Allegory
An unusual type of orchestration sometimes called violons en basse is encountered in arias by French Baroque composers, including Couperin, Campra, and Rameau. In such pieces, the basse continue line is played by violins or violas notated in a high clef; the solo voice and any additional obbligato instruments remain in the treble register as well. This phenomenon has gone practically unnoticed by modern scholars and was seemingly unremarked upon …
Anonymous IV as an Informant on the Craft of Music Writing
For the 13th-century music writer known as Anonymous IV, the craft of music writing was a primary literary concern, though one virtually ignored by previous modern writers on music. The importance of music writing to Anonymous IV is evident from the variety and quantity of references in his treatise, many of which are found in its central second chapter. This information-rich chapter includes a history of music notation and a miniature handbook f…
Virtual Segments
Music-theoretical writings from the 13th to the 15th centuries maintained a basic distinction between two types of major sixth, customarily labeled hexachordum and deductio (or proprietas). The term hexachordum, more frequently called tonus (or semitonus) cum diapente, designated the interval of a major of minor sixth, frequently expressed by pitch letters only (such as G-e and A-F) and discussed independently of Guidonian solmization. On the oth…
Heinrich Isaac among the Florentines
In the archives of the old and wealthy patrician family of the “da Filicaia” housed in the Florentine Archivio di Stato survives a group of letters written by, among others, one Ambrogio Angeni to the young Antonio da Filicaia, away on family business in northern Europe for extended periods of time during the 1480s and 1490s. The correspondence details the musical activities of these young men's Florentine brigata and reveals a close involvement …
Fowle Originalls" and "Fayre Writeing
Purcell's surviving autographs have long been a source of fascination, and the extensive evidence they preserve of his working methods has been examined in several academic studies. However, methodology has focused on analyzing notational changes within the sources, and neither the appropriateness of the standard labels "working draft" and "fair copy" nor the directness of the relationship between the creation of a composition and its encoding in…
A Broader View of Musical Exoticism
Most previous writings on musical exoticism reflect the unspoken assumption that a work is perceived by the listener as exotic only if it incorporates distinctively foreign or otherwise highly unusual elements of musical style. This "Exotic Style Only" Paradigm often proves revelatory, especially for purely instrumental works. In operas and other musicodramatic works set in exotic locales, by contrast, music is heard within a narrative "frame" th…
Motets, French Tenors, and the Polyphonic Chanson ca. 1300
Despite frequent attempts to explain the emergence of a coherent type of polyphonic song in the early 14th century, our understanding is dominated by views drawn from lyric poetry, romance, criticism of musical and literary register, traditions of performance, and other abstract conceptualizations of this remarkable moment in the history of music. But there exists an extensive body of musical evidence that points to an energetic and sophisticated…
Breaking Form through Sound
Between Lully's death (1687) and Rameau's operatic debut (1733), composers of the tragédie en musique experimented with instrumental effects, greatly expanding the dramatic role of the orchestra. The profusion of these effects coincides with a new aesthetic reappraisal of instrumental music in France, as can be observed in the writings of Du Bos. The tempête constitutes one of the most remarkable examples. Its sonic violence was too strong to end…
The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-Hop Music
Multiple factors contributed to the elevation of jazz as "high art" in mainstream media reception by the 1980s. The stage was thus set for hip-hop groups in the late-1980s and early 90s (such as Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest, and Digable Planets) to engage in a relationship with jazz as art and heritage. "Jazz codes" in the music, said to signify sophistication, helped create a rap-music subgenre commonly branded "jazz rap." Connections may be…
Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach
Narratives of music and modernity have been prominent in musicological writings of the past decade, and the place of Johann Sebastian Bach within these narratives has formed the subject of stimulating debates. Recent studies by Karol Berger and John Butt have aimed to integrate Bach's Passion compositions into broadly conceived philosophical frameworks, in Berger's case focusing specifically on changing perceptions of time from a premodern sense …
Intellectual Contexts of “the Absolute” in French Musical Aesthetics, ca. 1830–1900
In 1895 the critic Édouard Dujardin reviewed a production of an Offenbach opera in a brief article titled “De la Périchole et de l’Absolu dans la musique.” That Dujardin invoked the term “absolute” in a discussion of a stage work suggests that, for him, “the absolute in music” was defined by something other than the presence or absence of texts. Moreover, that Dujardin uses the phrase “absolute in music” rather than “absolute music” suggests the …
Disciplining Song in Sixteenth-Century Geneva
Song was frequently disciplined in the sixteenth-century Consistory of Geneva as part of the broad program of social Reform led by Calvin. Between 1542 and 1552, more than one hundred cases involving illicit singing came before the Consistory court. These cases reveal the Consistory’s persistent attempt to control the singing of all members of Genevan society regardless of social status or situation. They also offer a new field of evidence for ex…
Did Vitry write an Ars vetus et nova
In book 7 of his Speculum musicae, the fourteenth-century music theorist Jacobus structures a defense of music as it had been practiced in the thirteenth century by such eminent musicians and theorists as Lambertus, Franco, and Petrus de Cruce against the practices of certain unnamed moderni active at the time of Jacobus’s writing. While Jacobus’s quotations from various theoretical works by Jehan des Murs have long been recognized, it previously…
Assembled Landscapes
This article examines the folding together of music and landscape in some recent albums featuring the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute that today animates an active and international music scene. Through analysis of the texts, images, and sounds on these albums, I explore the re-imagining of the shakuhachi's musical geography as the instrument reaches new players and places in Europe, Australia, and North America. Using recordings that incorpo…
Industrial Balladry, Mass Culture, and the Politics of Realism in Cold War Britain
Focusing on a series of pioneering radio ballads produced for the BBC between 1958 and 1961 by Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker, and Peggy Seeger, this article explores representations of industrial working-class culture in folksongs of the radical Left. Situating such work in relation to A. L. Lloyd, mass culture, the nascent New Left, gender, and the aesthetics of social realism (distinct from the project of Soviet socialist realism), I argue that …
Composing Authority in Six Forged “Haydn” Sonatas
In December 1993 news broke that six keyboard sonatas whose rediscovery was being hailed as “The Haydn Scoop of the Century” were, in fact, not by Haydn at all. It soon emerged that the compositions—initially believed to be the lost Hob. XVI:2a–e and 2g—were not simple misattributions, but rather something that has rarely been discussed in the music world: modern forgeries deliberately constructed to deceive scholars and listeners. Adapting philo…
Incan or Not? Building Ecuador's Musical Past in the Quest for a Nationalist Art Music, 1900-1950
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 …
Forgotten Histories of the Audiobook
This article investigates the different affordances of magnetic tape and print as they are entextualized in various co(n)texts by writers, ethnographers, and musicians throughout the Americas in the late 1960s. I analyze printed books made from tape recordings-Cuban anthropologist Miguel Barnet and his interview subject Esteban Montejo's Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave, 1966), Rodolfo Walsh's true-crime denunciation ¿Quién …
For Transdisciplinarity
This response situates Stephen Amico’s provocation within the context of an intimate connection between postcolonial thought and the drive towards interdisciplinarity. It examines via three critical moments the deeply intertwined desires to destroy the colony on the one hand and disciplinarity on the other. To this end it analyses the debates around interdisciplinarity between Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Laurent Dubreuil, before turning to t…
The German Connection
In 1930 the French composer Darius Milhaud achieved a major career milestone: his ambitious opera Christophe Colomb received its premiere at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden. The premiere was the most prestigious of a surprisingly large number of performances of Milhaud’s music in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Even as he found success in Germany, many French critics dismissed Milhaud’s music as frivolous or incomprehensible, and …
We Are All Musicologists Now”; or, the End of Ethnomusicology
Situated in the context of current examinations of academic disciplinarity, this article contributes to the decades-long discussions (or debates) regarding the status of ethnomusicology, arguing forcefully for the (sub-)discipline’s cessation. A focus on ethnomusicology’s very prefix, “ethn-”, exposes the field’s historical and continuing reliance upon colonialist ideology, continually reproduced in relation to both ethnicity (constructed in rela…
The Unlike Pair
Between 1919 and 1923 Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, op. 9 (1906) and Franz Schreker’s Chamber Symphony (1916) were repeatedly programmed together on public concerts in Germany. Critics reviewing these and other postwar performances often framed the two works in a distinctive and, by today’s standards, surprising way: they aligned Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony with an “expressionist” and Schreker’s Chamber Symphony with an “impressionist” …
“Exactly engrav’d by Tho
Thomas Cross Jr. was the first music printer to capitalize on the growth of public musical performances in late seventeenth-century England by producing cheap, single-sheet editions of the newest and most popular songs, especially those from the latest theater productions, for audience members and others in fashionable society to buy. As England’s first specialist music engraver, he was able to produce his simple prints of individual songs unusua…