![Troubled Times and Their Musics (2)](/api/image/getissuecoverimage?id=picture_2016_63301.jpg)
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It is no accident that two famous musical works created in the dark times of tyrannies before and during World War II belong to the genre of “dramma-oratorio” that, combining speaking and singing, is neither (pure) drama nor (pure) oratorio. When in the twentieth century, following Brecht, “a talk on trees nearly is a crime”, what then is a song, based on the beauty of its melody? Speaking therefore possibly appears to be a remedy that enables art to remain in contact with the spheres of politics and everyday life. The two works put in the center of the dramma-oratorio a dying hero, one historical, the other one fictitious: Joan of Arc, a French catholic heroine in the fight against England during the fifteenth century, on the one hand, and Thyl Claes, fils de Kolldraeger, modelled according de Coster’s novel Thyl Ulenspiegel, a picaresque Flemish hero in the fight against Spanish catholic occupation during the sixteenth century, on the other hand. Both works make use of historical aspects for depicting present conflicts, in both speaking signify a sound metaphor for the dark political times of twentieth century-tyrannies, as well as an expression of forces in opposition to those tyrannies. And it is neither an accident that both works were created in Switzerland, a country not involved in World War II: Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher in Basel in 1938, Vogels’s Thyl Claes in Geneva in 1943-1947.
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Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Romanian musicians and clergy became interested in the connections between the Romanian nation and its church music. The widely shared view was that Byzantine music had been adjusted to the Romanian language and spirit, shedding its Turkish features and acquiring a national character. Between the two world wars, the thinking on this national character became more varied and nuanced. Some authors carried on the prewar discourse and sought the national character of church chanting in secular peasant music. Others placed race at the center of the debate and argued that the Romanians’ musical conception (of Latin race) is linear, and the most appropriate texture for their music is polyphonic. A third category was interested not in the national particularities of Romanian music, but in its old Byzantine roots, advocating their restoration.
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The essay looks at the careers and music of selected Polish composers born at the turn of the twentieth century, who – under various circumstances – chose to live and work abroad, and consequently became forgotten in their native country during the dark, communistic regime. Their artistic oeuvre was neither debated nor analyzed, treated as degenerated and ignored, especially in the realm of Polish musicological discourse before 1990s. Can we talk about these composers as the representatives of the “invisible generation”? On the examples of Michał Spisak and Karol Rathaus but also Aleksander Tansman, Roman Palester and Andrzej Panufnik the chapter discusses the possibility of applying the term “invisible generation” to these – seemingly different – Polish composers, whose reception in their fatherland in the post WW reality was overshadowed by the political situation.
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During the twentieth century, the Romanian culture and art were inevitably affected by the totalitarian regimes installed in Romania. The first notable ideological annexation came to pass when Romania, an ally of Germany during the Second World War, copied partially the Nazi model (1940-1944); the second came into being with the onset of Communism in 1947 and thrived until 1989, with inevitable instances of continuation. The paper endeavours to point out some effects of this double ideologisation in the case of Mihail Jora (1891-1971), seen as the most important Romanian composer of the generation immediately following George Enescu. The case under discussion is the more relevant the more Jora repeatedly pleaded for music and politics never to mix.
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Like in the other state communist countries, in Serbia (then in the frame of Yugoslavia) a discontinuity was created between the pre- and post-WW2 composed music. The imposed doctrine of Socialist realism didn’t affect all active composers in the same way; generally speaking, those having been more modernistic oriented before the war experienced more difficulties to adapt to the new ideological precepts. Socialist realism however didn’t appear completely unprepared in Serbia because in pre-war times there had been attempts, however rare, to follow the Soviet Party line in the field of music composition. So a quite weak continuity could be discerned between the works of composers who were communists before the war, such as Vojislav Vučković (1910-1942), who after having composed several modernist works influenced by the ideas of Arnold Schoenberg and Alois Hába, began to simplify his idiom and introduced socially critical themes. The majority of Serbian composers were however confused as to the ways of implementing the new rulers’ demands. The relative shortness of the Socialist realist period – approximately four-five years, followed by several more years of its gradual diminishing of importance due to the political U-turn of 1948-1949 – was to blame for the great majority of the Serbian composers having been unprepared for the reception of the post-war international avant-garde music, at the time when it became acceptable to join the current Western trends (around 1960). So, it could be claimed that although Socialist realism served as a bridge between the pre- and post-war Serbian music, it also proved to be a serious cause of discontinuity in the development of the national music, whose effects took more than two decades (until around 1965) to be overcome.
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The essay describes the tragic events of the Ukrainian musical culture in the period of Stalin’s terror. The author explains – from a social and political perspective – the reasons why Ukrainian art and the Ukrainian intelligentsia had been subjected to repression. Most of the prominent artists were murdered; other examples of reprisal are considered, against the director, actor, public figure Les Kurbas, and against choreographer, composer, manager Vasyl Verkhovynets. The cruel extinction of blind kobza-players under Kharkiv is also described. Even after World War II, repressions against Ukrainian artists hadn’t been stopped, as we find out from the case of the composer Vasyl Barvinsky.
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This article shatters the myth of Scriabin’s neglect post mortem by tracking the activities of performers and State officials who ensured his music’s sustained presence in Russia. Chief among them was Lenin’s Commissariat for Public Education, Anatoli Lunacharsky, who programmed and lectured on Scriabin’s music for Bolshevik festivals. Lunacharsky believed that communal art could enlighten and unify the masses, and he vowed to educate the public by celebrating their pre-Revolutionary cultural heritage. By selecting Scriabin’s music for political rallies and State anniversaries, Lunacharsky drew explicit links between the composer’s quest to enlighten the masses and Marxist-Leninist tenets. Helping Lunacharsky to execute his cultural mission was Arthur Lourié, who served as head of the State music division (MUZO) from 1918-1921. In private circles, Scriabin’s legacy benefitted from the efforts of Russian symbolist philosopher Viacheslav Ivanov. Like Lunacharsky, Ivanov believed that music was the art form best suited for social betterment, and he regarded Scriabin as a national hero whose music could heighten the public’s spiritual consciousness. Scriabin’s enduring popularity during this forgotten period deserves greater recognition, as it provides a long-overdue corrective to his early posthumous reception, and demonstrates that pre-Revolutionary culture was not entirely eradicated after 1917, but in fact provided the building blocks of early Soviet culture.
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This study presents the rapid evolution of musical language and ideas in Scriabin’s piano sonatas, from Post-Romanticism to an entirely new cosmogonic understanding. The first part presents Scriabin’s more general musical thought: his philosophical perspective, as well as stylistic and aesthetic choices from the various stages of his career. The second part evinces the specific aspects of the sonata form as practiced by Scriabin – from the composer’s formal rigor to his specific “hidden pragmatism.”
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A full century ahead of his time, Scriabin was history’s first major multimedia artist. His milieu was mystical, symbolic, abstract, and philo– theosophical. In the decade leading up to his death in 1915, Scriabin was consumed with the creation of his Mysterium, an apocalyptical spectacle of gargantuan proportions that embraced the cosmos. Set in the Himalayas, it involved literally a cast of millions, and was to embrace all the senses; it was to go beyond the aural, to engage the ear but also the eye, the olfactory, the tactile and the gestural, in a word, to be fully experiential. Unfortunately, at the time of his untimely death at age 43, Scriabin had completed only the text and a few dense musical sonorities for its Prefatory Act. With so little extant material, could a reconstruction even be possible? To begin, the most authentic surviving part of Scriabin’s Mysterium is its core, his collection of remarkable poetry penned in the spirit of Russia’s Silver Age. As the point of departure, to find the corresponding embodiment of his musical ideas and the maturation of his own musical language we must look to his last completed orchestral composition, the Op. 60, Prometheus – The Poem of Fire. Then to fully realize a production only those compositions from the same period as Mysterium’s inception, i.e., the Opuses 57 to 74, works that embrace the same stylistic and philosophical aesthetic, would be selected. These late works embody every word, intonation, breath and emotion conveyed by Scriabin’s text. The following paper explores the musical path to a realization of the Mysterium through an assembly and examination of these late works.
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This essay sheds light on the impact that Scriabin’s music and cosmogonic understanding had on the author, throughout his life. Various memories are related – from his first encounter with Scriabin’s music in 1952 to visiting Scriabin’s house in Moscow in the 1970s. Subtle and personal comments reflect the author’s perception of Scriabin’s style. Nicolae Coman highlights, among others, Scriabin’s role in configuring his own system as a composer.
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Beginning with the second half of the 20th century, Romanian musicology has recorded a fast-paced modernization. Parallel with the historiographic direction, a current preoccupied with the problems of musical language itself flourished together with the effort of the coherent and systematic introduction of semiotics into musicological research and academic curricula. In this context, the author’s research work aligns with the fields of musical semiotics and narrativity. Three methods of analyzing a musical text from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels are presented which aim to adapt to the present understanding of the musical phenomenon.
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As an alternative to the traditional approach to the thematization of the musical canon (Kerman, Weber, Citron), this papers undertakes a cross-section analysis of the archetypal meanings associated with the canonical phenomenon. Even if the formulation of the canon as concept involves at least three constituent elements – the repertoire, the restorative relationship with the past and the normative-referential attitude, this purely technical vision needs to be counterpoised by the elucidation of some epicentral supra-meanings, deeply anchored in the collective imaginary. The focus on the three modernities of the European musical culture – the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Modernism, reveals a gallery of preferential mythological themes which are respectively and canonically associated to each modernity – the myth of Orpheus, the myth of Prometheus and the myth of Oedipus. A continuation of this emblematic series facilitates the identification of a fourth archetype, of musical postmodernism – the myth of Proteus. The relationship to the archetypal symbolism thus provides an ultimate confirmation of the value of the analytical assertions. By regarding these archetypes as idioms of the artistic language and imaginary of a cultural epoch, as ideological levers and, at the same time, as determinant, generative energies of the thematic choices, the process of formation of the artistic musical canon appears in a much clearer light.
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The majority of Eduard Hanslick’s commentators have unfortunately only evaluated and valued his work from the point of view of the author’s opposition to the aesthetics of feeling and to the treatment of music as an imitation of affect. He indeed distanced himself from it by way of the position he advocated, according to which every art has its own independence and, for that reason, can only be correctly analyzed through the lens of the form which constitutes its visage. With scientific examination at the core of its preoccupation, the object of aesthetic study, in Hanslick’s view, undoubtedly remains the musical work. His writings lie at the intersection of several, sometimes contradictory, influences, as the interpreters have underlined. In contesting the accusation that he was a “rigid formalist,” I do not aim to reveal a confused eclecticism. For his intentions led, in fact, to an aesthetics of autonomy, one that, as we shall see, called on scientific methods to observe a field that did not belong to the dimension of the real, of the material. Hanslick’s theory on the autonomy of music, maintained in not always solidly construed argumentation, is inspired not only by romantic precepts, but also by those belonging to scientific objectivism. As I have attempted to demonstrate, analytic modalities offer access to the autonomous musical structure owing to its creation through similar means. The process of composition is thus defined as a spiritual activity made possible through Phantasy, a term which actually points to the creativity of every individual who writes a score. The notion also indicates an essential moment of the autonomy of the musical piece, through the part it plays in delineating a few characteristics of the phenomenon: objectivity, intentionality, temporality, and historical independence. We are dealing with an analytic perspective that is not in the least speculative, nor, however, strictly formalist. Rigorousness, but also a piquant style, define Eduard Hanslick’s writings, this true 19th century practitioner of aesthetics, a personality with an obviously sharp insight into the nature of art. His endeavors certainly represent a first attempt at leading the study of music towards modernity.
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Usually, the name of George Enescu is synonym with the Romanian folklore. Any presentation what so ever mentions this topic, sometimes without pointing out the complexity of his music. His maturity works are the result of an aesthetics synthesis which necessitates a careful analysis. One of the components of his aesthetics synthesis is the key concept of the present article: the improvisational allures. We have chosen to concentrate ourselves only on two of Enescu’s piano works, the Pièces Impromptues op. 18 and the Piano Sonata op. 24 n°1, but other works, namely from his Oedipe period, could be part of the same theme-based collection. The improvisational allures in general have a particular status because they don’t escape to the scriptural domain. The principal topic in our case is the way that improvisation techniques are transformed in a compositional principal. The present article wishes to concentrate on the recognition and the analysis on the improvisational allures with the purpose of underlining a complex contradiction. It may be here, in this contradiction, the greatest complexity of our key concept: the composer seeks to give the illusion of a lack of periodicity with technical means based on it.
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The author summarizes George Lambelet’s views on Greek National Music, as they were expressed in two articles: The National Music (1901) published in the journal “Panathinaia” and Nationalism in Art and the Greek Folk Music (1928), edited in a series of feuilletons. According to Lambelet, Greek composers should combine the features of folk-song with the means of universal music, but following their own aesthetic principles. Significant for the harmonization of the folk melody are the Greek scales. In order to exemplify these views, Lambelet’s symphonic poem The Feast (The Village Fair, 1907) is analyzed, the national character being expressed by the folk-like melodies, the rhythmical patterns and the Greek scales.
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Don Giovanni/Juan, SonatOpera in due atti per violino e piano, written by composer Dan Dediu in 1995, represents a union, in a postmodern manner, of two musical genres, instrumental sonata and opera. The dramaturgical treatment of the instrumental “characters”, with allusions and quotes taken from Mozart’s operas and Strauss’s symphonic poems, follows the realization of portraits that capture, in a dynamic manner, the psychology of characters (Don Giovanni, Donna Anna, Commendatore, Leporello, Don Ottavio, Donna Elvira, Zerlina, Masetto). SonatOpera proposes an organization of the musical material according to the structure of the opera, with Ouvertura, Atto primo and Atto Secondo. The complex writing of the score for the two instruments references both the rich palette of technical-instrumental means that performers employ, as well as their availability to notice and convincingly convey the inner states of the presented characters, but reinterpreted (usually in an ironic manner), from a postmodern perspective.
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