Search Results

This chapter places Chopin within Warsaw's lively concert scene. The concert life in Warsaw was dominated by virtuoso concerts, featuring local and foreign artists, Niccolò Paganini and Johann Nepomuk Hummel among them. The conventions and repertories associated with the virtuoso concerts, piano concertos in particular, as well as Chopin's earliest public concerts are discussed in detail. At the same time, music societies provided opportunities for performances on symphonic and chamber repertories that included the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. There were ambitious performances of sacred music in Warsaw churches, especially the Piarists' Church which hosted the Society for Church Music, and the Lutheran Church, which during the 1820s attracted Warsaw's best musicians, including the young Chopin. Musical performances also took place in many cafés. In some cafés, artistic projects were discussed and artistic events received the most candid reviews; others fostered an atmosphere of intense patriotism.

Music in Oxford flourished throughout the 17th century, revolving about both the university and the city. The degree of Bachelor of Arts in Music was granted from the end of the 15th century at the latest; the earliest recorded recipient of the Doctor of Music degree was the celebrated composer Robert Fayrfax in 1511. There was a newly revived tradition of performing sacred music in Oxford in the 17th century, following an earlier period of decline. Except during the Interregnum, services and anthems were performed in the colleges which had choral foundations, namely New College, Christ Church, Magdalen College, and St John's College, as well as in the university church of St Mary's. Secular musical celebrations also took place on various occasions in the college and university calendar. Regular events included the annual Act ceremonies, while exceptional occasions, notably royal visits, provided an opportunity to produce stage plays and lavish musical entertainments. Official university activities of this kind were paralleled by the public ceremonial and religious rites of the city, and indeed ‘town’ and ‘gown’ music overlapped.

In late 20th-century American religious experience, women gathered to use sacred music in transformative ways to change their condition in a society and in religious practices dominated by men. Women's ritual music draws upon many different traditions, from traditional hymns with new texts to secular art music (e.g., by Luciano Berio) to popular music with African American roots (e.g., performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock). This chapter examines different occasions, most of them non-liturgical and outside congregational religious practice, and the creation of new texts from existing hymns or songs as the convergence of women's ritual practice. The rituals and repertories examined in the chapter acquire political potential, and their performance serves to empower women to act together to bring about real change in their lives.

John Grady would tell friends that he had always dreamed of having one job—music director of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Whether or not that was strictly true, most of his existence could be viewed as preparation for his work at the Cathedral, or at least a place like it. Called “the first native New Yorker since William Pecher to hold the position”, Grady had jumped into the Manhattan sacred music scene early on as a boy soprano at venues such as the Church of the Blessed Sacrament and the Church of Incarnation. At age thirteen, he discovered the organ. Once his career began to move, he was able to add some alluring European credits with recital work at Notre Dame and Westminster Cathedral. Grady drew up plans of the sort that had never been attempted before at St. Patrick's: concerts with full orchestra, chamber ensembles, and as a particular innovation, a Sunday afternoon series of organ recitals. This was a new and somewhat radical idea for any Catholic church, and a definite first for the Cathedral.

The mainstream repertory is so heavily Germanic that a novice of an earlier generation might easily have imagined that classical music had always been Teutonic territory. But in the art music of the Renaissance, the crucial region was what is now Belgium and northern France. Franco-Flemings like Dufay and Ockeghem dominated the 15th century, and their follower Josquin Desprez established the polyphonic style that dominated the 16th-century. This chapter presents an interview with Paul Hillier on Renaissance sacred music, the concept of definitive realization, size of an ensemble, how to perform a Renaissance piece, William Byrd’s Anglican works, instrumental accompaniment, voice production during the Renaissance, use of unwritten accidentals, barline as a musically significant element, transposition, intonation, improvisation, and authenticity and articulation in Renaissance music.

This book has traced the main stages of a complex process that changed the nature of music over several generations in the history of Ferrara in the fifteenth century. Perceived more broadly, it presents a detailed account of some of the operative factors in both music and in patronage that contribute to much larger patterns of change. It deals with the transformation of an established culture from a condition one can call “pre-musical” to one in which art-music had achieved the status of a major cultural resource. Formerly an occasional pastime, secular music had become a wide-ranging form of expression comprising a plurality of styles and means of performance. Sacred music had become under Ercole a true expression of his role as Christian prince, living in an ambience of intensified piety and enriching many of the major liturgical and devotional occasions of his life.

This chapter discusses changes in Soviet musical life on the eve of the so-called Cultural Revolution, particularly the acceptance of key Western and Russian classics as part of the new Soviet state's censorship and cultural propaganda. It examines the efforts of musicians and scholars to build Soviet musical culture during the 1920s, which includes propagandising the generation of composers known as the Russian classics, focusing on three major figures: Pëtr Chaykovskiy, Modest Musorgskiy, and Mikhail Glinka. It also considers the Bolshevik government's support for ‘bourgeois’ music-making as well as the movement towards mass cultural education; the Soviet Union's canonising of major Western composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Richard Wagner; repertoire politics in the Leningrad Philharmonia and Moscow Philharmonia; debates in the music press over the issue of Western modernism; and the controversy surrounding the Imperial capella's retention of sacred music.

The late nineteenth century was a fascinating time in which to be a church musician. The job did not carry the swank of centuries past, when choristers were lifelong retainers and routinely wore their robes in public as a declaration of pride, but it was possible for a musician to conduct an entire career in sacred music without losing face among his colleagues. This was definitely the case in cities, and in New York especially so; and at St. Patrick's Cathedral—the newest, the largest, the most exciting of churches of the time—very much so indeed. Several factors contributed to this climate, and they had absolutely nothing to do with religious sensibilities of any kind. The prime motivator was the city's big-time media culture in its first flush. This chapter looks at the early years of the St. Patrick's Cathedral choir under William F. Pecher and how its music was influenced by the Cecilians.

In treatments of the political, social, and cultural history of Saxony, Elector Johann Georg II (r. 1656–80) generally receives only scant mention. Scholars of musical life in Dresden during the Baroque era have focused their attention on the reigns of Johann Georg I, Friedrich August I (r. 1694–1733), and Friedrich August II (r. 1733–63), and have left the decades of the later seventeenth century largely unexplored. But the resulting lack of attention to musical activity during Johann Georg II's reign is unjustified, for he stands as a bold and venturesome spirit, one who crossed confessional boundaries in order to introduce the most recent Italian sacred music into this Lutheran area of northern Europe. He brought castrati to Dresden, appointed Roman composers as his Kapellmeisters, and advanced a new musical idiom in his court chapel, one whose influence would be felt in courts and cities as far away as Stockholm. With its large, Italian-dominated Hofkapelle, Johann Georg II's court stood with those of the Holy Roman Emperor and the elector of Bavaria as one of the most important centers of musical patronage in the German-speaking lands.

Laying the theoretical groundwork for this collection of essays, the introduction examines the convergence of the sacred and social in music as the source for transcendence. In religious experience, sound emerges from the silence in which music is ontologically immanent. Transcendence is possible because of the many forms in which sacred sound is experienced—in the hearing/listening crucial to samā^c in Islam, or filling the emptiness of um in Hinduism and Buddhism. For music cultures throughout the world, transcendence unfolds as transition in the sounding of eschatological allegories and the soteriological return that follows life. Sacred music both re-sounds and resounds with transcendence. The volume introduction examines the similarities and differences among the different musical and religious cultures of the subsequent chapters, seeking to elucidate the many ways in which the transcendence afforded by sacred music is common to the ways human beings musically re-sound experiences in their lived-in worlds.

Christopher Page first ruffled the early-music world in the late 1970s, when he (and, independently, the American scholar Craig Wright) put forward a radical hypothesis. It held that the instruments popularized by Noah Greenberg, Thomas Binkley, and David Munrow were modern impositions; that medieval polyphony was usually performed with voices taking every line and with little or, more often, no instrumental accompaniment; and that even monophonic music may often have been sung unaccompanied. Audiences and performers had come to love those shawms and rebecs, and scholars had supported their use, so it is not surprising that the idea was hardly welcomed—except, significantly, in the United Kingdom, with its wealth of cathedral-trained singers. This chapter presents an interview with Page on medieval music, the medieval experience of music, secular song performance, complex three-texted motets, sacred music and chant, connection of music with mathematics and science, historical performances and how to recognize them, accuracy of duration, and expressiveness in singing texts.

This chapter examines the shape-note tradition, which is considered to be one of the most obscure forms of sacred music still practiced by African Americans. It traces how Sacred Harp music entered into the African American lexicon of songs and offers information on the Wiregrass Singers of Ozark, Alabama, who are the last representatives of the four-shape notation system. The chapter also suggests that the coexistence of four-note and seven-note democratic systems reflects the African American communitarian outlook.

William F. Pecher had more than enough reason to be discouraged. For most of his life, the organist had led an existence in which careful plans had always been made, but nothing had worked out exactly as planned. Music-making on a high level could be a risk, often a ruinously expensive one. New Yorkers hungry for musical improvement would soon notice an increase in cash outlay, if not quality. This chapter traces the history of St. Patrick's Cathedral and Pecher's tenure as its first ever choirmaster. St. Patrick's maintains an unusual place in the history of sacred music—not only because of its fame but also because its own history coincides with that of a critical time in the history of New York itself, when the city evolved from a commercial port town into an international capital.

In giving Pietro Yon authority over the music at St. Patrick's, the Cathedral was committing to a very grand experiment. He would receive a lavish budget and whatever personnel he deemed necessary to create the kind of sacred music for which he had become famed. To enhance the experience, there would be a tripartite organ, one of the largest in the world. The idea was costly but absolutely logical. St. Patrick's Cathedral was moving from national to international prominence, and its musical needs would be best served by a world-class musician who was also a world citizen. In this, Yon fit the bill perfectly. He would assemble a group of male singers who became the core of the Male Soloist Ensemble. Yon's time at St. Patrick's had been bracketed by national catastrophes—the Depression at the beginning, World War II at the end. Still, he had prevailed handsomely.

Medieval composers rarely expected their sacred music to be listened to for its own sake. They designed it to accompany church services—events of solemn meaning for medieval worshippers, but not for modern concert audiences. On top of that, they set texts with little appeal or resonance for most modern listeners. For these reasons, their music translates to the modern concert hall with difficulty. Anonymous 4 have been unusually successful in this act of translation. This chapter presents an interview with Susan Hellauer, who discusses how the group approaches it, how the group translates music written for one context to others that are very different, how they deal with objectionable texts, their performance of chant, expressiveness in singing chant, issues of authenticity, and the role of women in performing medieval music.

Throughout his reign, Johann Georg remained steadfast in his dedication to the cause of modern Italian sacred music. Despite the crushing burden of debt bequeathed to him by his father and a treasury perpetually characterized by a dearth of funds, he managed to maintain a musical ensemble that nearly matched those of Vienna and Munich in size, and which was similarly dominated by Italian musicians. The remarkable stability of the size of the Italianate component in the Hofkapelle throughout his reign testifies to the fact that, although his recruitment policies and procedures cannot easily be reconstructed today, Johann Georg was able to develop a successful (if somewhat unsystematic) strategy for attracting Italian musicians to Dresden. As a result, his court stood with those of Vienna, Munich, Innsbruck, and Warsaw as a major haven for Italian musicians in northern Europe.